


OTMA

by allonsytotumblr



Category: Anastasia (1997), Anastasia RPF, The Romanovs
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Drama, Family, Gen, Ghosts, Historical, Hurt/Comfort, RPF, Revenge, Sisters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-28
Updated: 2017-11-30
Packaged: 2018-12-21 02:15:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 32,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11934216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allonsytotumblr/pseuds/allonsytotumblr
Summary: Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova. Together they were OTMA. After the revolution, these former Grand Duchesses struggle to find their place in the new world.





	1. Chapter 1

It's a strange feeling, waking up. Your consciousness trickles back into your body and switches your brain on, and you're suddenly, here, somewhere, receiving information from your senses when a moment ago you were just an inert body.

Olga comes to first. It makes sense, poetically. She's the oldest, the first to come into the world, her female body sliding out, into the hands of a disappointed doctor. But then her surrounds were warm and bright and filled with people, and she breathed for the first time, screaming her arrival to the world. Now there is none of that.

The room is dark. Quiet. There are things, furniture, and paintings, and clothes, piled everywhere. Disordered. A dollhouse with the the neatly ordered objects removed and piled back in randomly. This room looks so different that Olga at first does not recognize it. But then her eyes find a painting. Hanging on the wall, tilted at a haphazard angle.

The face in the painting, a regal looking older man, iis some distant relative, who Olga cannot actually name, but that does not matter, because suddenly she knows where she is, she remembers being in this room, this room at the Winter Palace. She is in her former home in Saint Petersburg. A world away from Siberia. Years of memories flood her brain. Playing here. Learning her lessons. Attending church services. Putting on plays with her sisters. Grand balls. Staying inside as an angry mob stormed towards the palace. Leaving for a safer residence. What is happening? She sits up from the hard wooden floor, why is she lying down, letting her thoughts spill out into words, as she shouts, desperate, "Mama! Papa!"

She begins to walk, turning a corner, running now, where is her family, where are the soldiers, past an ornate chair, where is the basement, we were all in a basement, her feet, those weren't the shoes I remember wearing last, skidding to a stop as she comes upon a mirror. Who is that? A young woman stares back at Olga. It is her. It is not. The mirror woman is dressed in a pretty feminine white dress. Olga used to own it a lifetime ago. She remembers wearing the dress while sitting for a formal family portrait, where is her family. The first time she put it on, she felt like an angel. The dress' fine fabric is nothing like the coarse, serviceable clothes she remembers wearing last. Olga did not even bring the dress with her to Siberia. Angels had no place in the House of Special Purpose.

The mirror woman has long hair. Long thick flowing brown hair. But Olga's hair had been cut short after her illness. What's happened to me? She had cried then, for her pretty hair, in her dazed, sick state, as it was all shorne off. Stroking it frantically, it's real, Olga wishes for her short hair back. How long have I been unconscious for, not years it can't be years, was I even unconscious? The woman in the mirror is Olga Nikolaevna Romanova, Grand Duchess. This woman is not her anymore. This woman has no answers.

Olga turns away from the mirror, resisting the urge to break it, don't, it's bad luck. She must find her family, she must fine her family and then everything will be fine. They will get out of here, and survive whatever game their executioners are playing with them, where is her family. This room is smaller than she remembers, but there are still so many places where people could be hidden. Or so many places where Yurovsky's men could be hiding, waiting to shoot. What if they're here, what if I'm the last one left alive, but why would they bring me here to kill me, why not just in the basement? She yells out their names again, "Mama, Papa, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, Alexei!" As if their names are spell and she is a witch, calling them out, summoning them to her.

And though she was calling to get a reply, Olga almost faints from shock when another figure in white, an angel, runs towards her.

"Olga!"

Not an angel. Her sister.

Tatiana is wearing a white dress as well, are we supposed to be brides, what kind of sick game is this, and her hair is long again. Tatiana was always the pretty one, with her slanted eyes and her pretty nose. Now fear and uncertainty is smeared all over her face, blurring her beauty.

Tatiana speaks first, "Where are-"

"I don't know-" The questions are answered before they are fully formed, taken out of the other sister's mouth. These two have always been a team, Olga and Tatiana. The big pair.

"Did you find-"

"Maria and Anastasia." The younger two. The little pair. Relief floods Olga's body, and Tatiana finishes, "But no one else," and Olga feels dread hit her again. Stop this, everything will be fine, we four are fine, we can find the rest of our family.

She is so frightened, but so is Tatiana, and Olga will be brave for her, and Tatiana will know this, and be brave for Olga, and they will both be a little less scared.

Reaching out and embracing her younger sister fiercely, Olga tries to banish all the darkness and the questions hiding in it. And then she hears people running towards them. She looks up, terror spiking through her body, who has found us? But Olga sees no soldiers intent on murder, but Maria and Anastasia. They have been following after Tatiana, and Olga gasps their names, and reaches out, and the little pair is included in their circle, hugging them. They are here, here. Olga is crying, completely overwhelmed by the situation.

Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia. OTMA. They are one single unit. Indissoluble. We are here, we are all here. Everything will be fine.

Eventually they let go of each other, still holding hands, a circle, needing human contact to reassure themselves of their presence. And everyone speaks at once, their statements and questions overlapping and colliding, tangling and breaking apart.

"I remember."

"The basement."

"They were killing us-"

"And now we're here-"

"Did they knock us out and bring us here?"

"But our hair…"

"And why bring us here?"

"Could we have been unconscious for days?"

"Perhaps we forgot the journey? People in traumatic situations can do that-"

"What did they do with everyone else?"

"Are we prisoners here?"

No one asks where they are. At least this is known. No one says killed. No one says dead or shot. But the question coils, unsaid under all their theories, under all their words: What if they killed Mama, Papa, and Alexei, because they were the important ones- the Tsar, the Tsarina, and the Tsarvitch- and left us alive because we weren't? What if our family is gone, and we are the only ones left, but our family line is dead, and we are nothing anymore?

No one says this.

"We have to look around," says Olga. She wants to get out. Out of this room first, then of this nightmare. "We know this place better than anyone. If they're hidden here, we can find them, and if they're not," If they're dead. "We'll look somewhere else.'

No one objects. They cross the room to the drawing room doors, which are huge and and whose hinges have not been oiled in far too long. The hinges scream as the girls put them open, and everyone freezes, like children, out of bed who have just knocked over something very heavy. There is no answer, no shouting, no voices- not the harsh shouting of the soldiers, not their parents either.

The room opens up into a wide hallway. Olga remembers running down it in happier times, chasing her sisters. They were playing some game involving queens and assassins. She does not remember the particulars, but it definitely involved chasing, up and down the floors-newly polished then. Tatiana and Anastasia were the assassins and they had drawn mustaches on their faces with black pencil. Now the floors are dull, and the girls are not queens, or Grand Duchesses anymore, but prisoners of the Ural Soviet Block, and they have met assassins, but they are not men with dastardly mustaches, but ordinary men with evil hiding in their minds.

It is like a game of hide and seek, come out, come out wherever you are, but there is no end, no shouting that you give up, that you cannot find them, no dramatic bursting out from a wardrobe or crawling out from underneath a bed.

The search goes on and on. The girls become methodical about it: opening the door to a room, calling out the names, that the soldiers are gone, waiting to see in anyone emerges. If the room is large, they will advance farther into it, repeating the message. And they wait. And no one comes out. Hello hello hello spreads itself out, ripples in a pond, out with no answer.

The palace is empty, yet there have been people here before. Looters- they find smashed wine bottle, scratches as if things have been dragged across the floor, open wardrobes standing empty, drawers half closed, things are slightly out of place, a few meters to the left of where they should be, crooked, or upended. Others have taken up residence here too. The Provisional Government made their headquarters here; Olga finds a draft of a letter detailing how to maintain peace and order among the citizens written by Alexander Kerensky to one of his ministers. This strategy had been futile, as his government was overthrown a few months later. Bastards, denouncing us and the monarchy, pretending to stand up for the workers while enjoying all the comforts of our palace. She hates the thought of these men here, and drops the letter. It falls to the ground soundlessly.

The rooms are still beautiful. No amount of revolutions and provisional governments can change that. Everything is gilded or embroidered or jewel encrusted. It reminds Olga of the tiny ornate Faberge eggs, ordered from craftsmen to be given as gifts. She had forgotten the opulence of her home. She had forgotten what it felt like to be surrounded by beauty every single day. Even during the War, seeing the horrible effects of violence every day while caring for the wounded men, there was always a palace to return to, always an oasis away from the ugliness of daily life. The gold, jewels, rich fabrics, and bright colors were still bright no matter how many of patients she's seen die that day.

The sisters talk continuously. Not of anything important, but just to fill the place with sound. Olga has never noticed how quiet the palace is before. Maria is praying under her breath, a continuous stream of words to Heaven, more for her own consolation than to receive an answer, Hail Mary, Hail Mary, Hail Mary, over and over. Tatiana and Anastasia argue back and forth with different theories to explain their circumstances: "What if it was Father Gregori, if his spirit is protecting us?"

"He certainly prayed over us enough, all those visits in our bedrooms-."

"He prayed so much over Alexei too, and Mama-"

"Perhaps he wasn't who he said he was, people always said he was a fraud or even a demoniac-"

"But he's dead anyway, how would even a saint have enough power?"

"God?"

"Ridiculous, does God care about Grand Duchesses, or only about Tsarevitch?"

"Anastasia!" This verges on blasphemy, and Olga silences her, even though they are far away from the church. The church has lost its power, the soldiers said, people believed in the new government now. Still it is a habit, scolding her youngest sister, and Olga continues it no matter what the circumstances.

They search through one wing of the palace, and find themselves facing the main doors. We only searched one floor in the palace, only one, this is a huge building, they could anywhere, still hiding. Maria darts over to the doors and the handle depresses under her hand, creating an audible click as the bolt slides out. No one has locked us in. So we are not prisoners. There is a heavy iron bar laid horizontally across the doors to prevent them from opening, but four girls standing on chairs could lift it. Maria turns and looks back at the other three. Questioning.

"We shouldn't go out, not yet." Olga tells her. "There are thousands of rooms here."

"It's way too dark."

"Someone could see us."

Tatiana and Anastasia raise their objections. Maria drops her hand and turns away from the doors. She does not really want to go out either. Here is safe. Here is known.

As Olga walks towards the next wing of rooms, something about what her sisters said about it being too dark to search outside bothers her. The palace is not illuminated by any light source, and yet, she can see. It is not quite like seeing with a light on, but rather, wherever she looks, she is able to see. At first she thought it was moonlight, but when she looks out a window, the moon is hidden behind clouds.

Outside she sees the the grounds beyond the palace, unkempt now. It is summer now, and there is no snow, but Olga remembers how it used to look, in winter, covered in snow. She remembers running through the palace gardens, the snow crunching under her feet, the cold air chilling her lungs, her breath coming out in great billowing white clouds. She turns away from the window- her breath- and she stops.

Her breath. And suddenly it makes sense, all of it, why she looks different, why she's back in the Winter Palace, why she can see better in the dark- everything makes sense. She gasps, an involuntary intake of air. Olga feels her lungs expand and then contract, pushing the air out. It does not feel like breathing. It feels unnecessary, a motion that she does not have to repeat. She has not been breathing. She has not needed to. She is dead.

Dead, no longer in need of oxygen. Dead, no longer alive. Dead, but still in the world. Dead, a ghost.

She has been dead for hours. Her corpse is lying somewhere in Siberia, with the bodies of her family. I remember, they took us down to the basement. Her parents were brought chairs, as if we were taking a formal portrait. They told us to wait for a truck, that we were being taken to a safer location, safer from what, who wanted to harm us more than them and then Yurovsky spoke: "Continuing...attack on Soviet Russia, the Ural Executive Committee has decided to execute you." Her stomach clenching in fear, I didn't want to die. Yurovsky commanding again, and then her parents were killed, her father shot first under a rain of bullets, then her mother. And then us. Shooting and smoke, so much smoke. I couldn't see, I didn't know which way to run. Maria ran, I think. She remembers crouching on the floor, unhurt. And we still weren't dead. The soldiers, unable to see in the smoke, switched to using bayonets, stabbing blindly. Look at you, want to run the world and you can't even shoot straight! She thought and then nothing. Until waking up here.

"Stop!" She calls out, and her sisters, a small flock of white figures ahead of her, ghosts, we look like ghosts, not brides, halts and turns around to face her. "We're dead. We're all dead."


	2. Chapter 2

Being dead is a difficult thing to accept. No one's mind wants to think that it has stopped. The sisters fight about it for hours. Olga discovers that besides not breathing, she has no pulse and her skin is cold and too pale. Even when she pinches her skin, hard, skin does not flush pink.

The others do not want to believe her, but they do, eventually. There is no other explanation. But the question it begets is harder to answer: Why? What power let us be killed, only to bring us back?

Ghosts have never been part of catechism classes. A deserted Winter Palace with her sisters is not Heaven, but it cannot be Hell either. Purgatory has fire too- doesn't it? Olga cannot believe that this is an act of God.

Even after death, they have no control of their own fates. We could not have the throne because we were girls. We could not have the monarchy because of the rebels. We could not be left alone in exile, because our family could serve as a rallying point. We could not even have a normal death because, because- what? She does not know.

Hours ago, in the basement, she did not want to die, and now she wants to die -properly- more than anything.

It is the middle of the night, but no one is tired; apparently ghosts do not need to sleep, so the girls wander around the Palace for hours. Searching. No one else is there.

Either the rest of their family is dead, really dead, or they have awoken? Been reborn? Somewhere else? Olga thinks of the kilometers and kilometers of Russia, all of the cities, and villages, and frozen wastelands where they could be. If we find them, can we all die?

The light bleeding in through the windows and under doors turns paler and paler. The emptiness of the whole Palace is illuminated, and everyone's minds turn to one thing:

Out.

Olga thinks: if we do go out and someone sees us, it means that we are real, not ghosts. But if someone recognizes us, we could be killed.

But maybe that is what she wants to happen, to be killed by a mob on the streets, to finally leave behind everything the past years have held, and just die, no more war, no more provisional governments, no more intense monotony of Siberian exile, just peace and seeing her family together again.

She says: "We have to go outside eventually."

She thinks: but if we do go out and no one sees us, that means that we are ghosts.

She says, "We should put on different clothes. Servants clothes. So we won't look out of place.

And Olga finds herself looking in a mirror again for the second time since she woke up, ghosts don't wake up, but she has no other word for it. They managed to find common clothes, left behind in a servant's room. The woman in the mirror looks more like the Olga she remembers, wearing a jacket, boots, and a long skirt. The fabric is scratchy, but she is used to that. She ties her hair back and it almost looks like it is cut short again. She is Olga, prisoner of the state again.

There were jewels sewn into their old clothes. Will the soldiers, picking over their real bodies find them? What will be done with the jewelry? Will they pocket them and sell them, or turn them over to Yurovsky, to be exhibited in a museum, as a gross example of the excesses of the overthrown dynasty?

When she took off her white dress she discovered bullet wounds on her body. She stifled a scream; it seems even ghosts don't like seeing holes in their bodies. They were not bleeding or even bloody, simply marks where metal objects had pierced. There was no pain, not even when Olga tentatively traced her fingers over them. Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia bear similar ones. There are no gashes from bayonets. Bayonets did not kill us. Bullets did. We bear the marks of how we died.

As a nurse, she saw hundreds bodies torn open, but they did not bother her as much as these. The soldiers' wounds were bleeding, painful, alive, and hers are very much not. She is grateful for the new clothing, which covers all of her damaged skin. It is armor. She does not have to think about her new scars. She does not want to. The human brain panics at the sight of wounds, this is not natural, I am wounded, vulnerable, help me, help me. It is a futile desire; she is dead for God's sake, and her body is beyond help, beyond pain, beyond danger of contamination. Still, she wished she could stitch them shut.

Tatiana has a bullet hole in the side of her head. A small one, the bullet must have just grazed her. The skin is torn away, and her skull is exposed, white and hard. It is ghastly, but Tatiana handles it well, parting her hair on the side and combing her fingers through it, hiding the bone. In the hospital she was always better with this kind of thing than Olga was.

The sisters straighten their clothes again and again. Stalling. Olga wants to leave, and yet she does not. She wants answers, but not if the truth is frightening. She wants to see how her country has changed since she left it, but she is scared that she will not recognize it.

Eventually they do go out, throughout a back entrance, one she cannot remember ever using before. The sun is blinding and harsh. The grounds look so different now. Overgrown, wild, littered with dried leaves and detritus. Like an amusement park closed for the season. The marque would read: The Romanov Exhibit is suspended due to the family's executions, but come and see the spectacle of the New Socialist Utopia, just to your left, comrade!

What a horrible thing to think. I am not myself.

There is no one here either. If the rest of our family has been reborn, would they really have been reborn somewhere else? This was their home too-stop it, focus on your surroundings.

She feels a pang of longing, remembering all the happy times she spent in these gardens. Before we had ever heard of Soviets.

They reach the end of the grounds, empty, and exit through a gap in the fence. The metal has been cut, probably by looters, leaving a jagged hole. There are no guards patrolling the parameter. Maybe the mystique of the dynasty keeps out most looters and vandals, or maybe the government just does not care anymore.

The street they face looks so unchanged: here are still people and noise and horses. Olga has been on this street before, with her whole family, now we're separated, and people had wept to see them, no one even looks twice at us four girls now, blessing them, now the government has killed God too. There were flowers, and music, the old national anthem, there's a new one now. The Tsar used to be considered so close to God, with his son ready to take the crown as the next leader, and they overthrew him and shot a sickly boy to break the line, and people loved the girls and their mother as well, but we had no real power, why did they kill us, what could we have done? Out mother could not inherit the throne, the people never would have taken that, and us girls, did they think we could change the Salic laws and rule?

If she had been left alive, would she have tried that? Would it have worked, could she have been the first female ruler since Catherine the Great? She, the eldest, as the Tsar, with her sisters as her advisors? Could she have overthrown the Soviet government and the Salic laws? Perhaps the people would have accepted her over the new government but even so, she would have no idea how to run an entire country, not one with the underlying discontents and problems that had caused the revolution. If she have lived in exile, she would have become a forgotten aristocrat in a western european country, writing conspiratorial letters to displaced ministers, occasionally having her picture in the paper: Former Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna Romanovna Steps Out In Season's Latest Style! "Down with the Soviets," she says.

They walk tentatively, down the street. Examining the faces of the people passing, Olga sees their eyes passing the girls. They do not appear to be seen. We are invisible. It is odd, to be hidden in plain sight, to be folded into a different crease of reality, to be so near to her people and yet so far away. She has absolutely no idea what to do now. Are they supposed to search the whole city and then all of Russia for their family?

There is a little girl standing on the street, as the flow of adults passses around her. She seems lost, looking up at the faces around her. Anastasia runs over to her and kneels down, saying, "Hello, hello are you alright?"

Olga almost faints from shock, what is she doing, but it's fine we're invisible remember, you said we were invisible. The girl does not see Anastasia. Her eyes continue to dart around searching.

And Olga remembers a passage from A Christmas Carol, "The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever."

We still have no power. We were powerless royals and we are powerless ghosts. But the ghosts in A Christmas Carol were being punished for their sins and we are innocent.

The girl's mother rushes up behind her, relief flooding her face, as she picks the child up and cries, "Masha, I told you not to run away!" Anastasia steps back, unnecessarily. The woman cannot see her either.

Masha, a diminutive of Maria, her sister's name. Perhaps this child is named after the third princess. It would not be unlikely, there were so many people who idolized them, read every detail of their lives they could find, and put their picture on anything: collectable cards and boxes of chocolate. What would happen to all that memorabilia? She imagines Romanov collectable items being rounded up and burned, because keepsake pictures threaten the new regime.

They walk on. Ghosts do not get tired. She could run without becoming short of breath. If her brother Alexei had been brought back, he would be able to run around all he wanted without the constant specter of injury. Ghosts have no blood to bleed out. And her mother, would she have been healthy again too? Are they well, wherever they are?

It is so odd to walk along, completely unnoticed and ordinary. Olga thinks that even if people could see their faces, they will not realize four former Grand Duchesses are in their midst.

Years and years ago, of her tutors explained how hiding in plain sight works. "Say you have a servant, who looks a bit like the Tsar," he said, and Olga giggled to think of her father doing a servant's tasks.

"No matter how much he looks like the Tsar, you would not think it was him, because it does not make sense to your brain for the Tsar to be your servant. He just looks like him, you tell yourself. People are rational. If presented the option of having the Tsar in disguise as your servant, or the option of having a servant who looks like the Tsar, even if this servant disappears every time the Tsar makes a public appearance, your mind will be inclined believe the latter."

This idea fascinated Olga, and she scrutinized the faces of all the palace servants she saw that day, trying to see if they looked like well known public figures. They did not.

It does not make sense for dead Grand Duchesses to be walking down the street in borrowed servants clothes. It does not make sense to Olga either, but there is no other option her mind can latch on to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Historical Notes:
> 
> Alexei suffered from hemophilia, and the girls' mother had poor health.
> 
> The Salic Laws were put in place by Paul the First to stop women from inheriting the throne.
> 
> Author's Notes:
> 
> I am so glad that people are enjoying this! Go to thedragonscosplay on DeviantArt to see this week's, and last week's cover images. Go to the gallery OTMA.
> 
> I'm kind of spoiling you guys because this updated in less than a week, so the third chapter may take longer than a week to write. There will be at least one chapter from every girl's POV.
> 
> Thanks to my beta: ElizabethAnnSoph


	3. Chapter 3

The girls are going to church. When faced with a successful execution attempt, reincarnation from the dead, loss of three family members, painless bullet wounds, transportation over thousands of kilometers, and invisibility, going to church is really the only option, and they cannot wander aimlessly around the street forever.

The Church of Our Savior on the Spilled Blood is close, but they had never walked there before. You cannot casually walk places when you are a Grand Duchess. You can when you are a ghost.

Now it looms up before them, untouched by revolutions and the end of dynasties. Their family funded this church almost entirely, and it is covered in brightly colored onion domes, wrought gold, ornate columns, and illuminated pictures of Christ and His saints. Every detail is finely rendered, and this is just the outside. Crosses jut out from every onion dome, shining brilliantly in the blue sky.

How long will it be before the new government touches churches too, letting looters in and melting down their gold to use their secular icon of a hammer and sickle?

Since they do not want to call attention to themselves by opening the door invisibly, the girls wait until an old woman enters, and slip in after her.

Women are supposed to be veiled in church, but the girls have nothing to use. I'm sorry, thinks Olga feeling a prick of guilt at disobeying such an important rule, next time, we will. Will there be a next time? Will they walk their dead bodies down here every Sunday, kneeling and standing, invisible next to the living? Do ghosts have to go to church?

Inside, the church, like every church Olga has ever been in, gives you the feeling for being removed from the world, cool, quiet, and smelling like incense. Saints look at them from the walls. Saints Peter, Patrick, Katherine, Lucy, Margaret, John, Gabriel, her namesake Saint Olga of Kiev. There are even figures painted onto the curved ceiling; in its middle, Christ stares down at the people below. The eyes are harsh and all seeing, and Olga thinks of Father Gregori, wondering if he is looking down at the girls as they struggle down here.

A new theory occurs to her: perhaps the rest of her family is in Heaven, only because of the prayers of Father Gregori. What if his prayers were not sufficient to guarantee the salvation of her and her sisters? But was my family that far for Heaven that only the prayers of a fake priest could grant them eternal peace? We were not that evil, no matter what the people said.

She turns away from the saints and their all-knowing, holy gazes. Every centimeter of every surface is painted. The floor has a mosaic pattern with six pointed stars encircling a geometric pattern. At the front, a structure, like a golden gate separates the people from the altar. The priest must act as the intermediary between the people, even for the Tsar.

There are people, mostly women, praying, kneeling or standing on the hard floor. Their mouths move, silently forming the words, asking for so many things, praying to ward off, loneliness, poverty, barrenness, pain, sickness, death, hell. Deliver us, O Lord we pray. An endless stream of requests to the Divine.

Olga wonders if anyone remembers to pray for the Tsar's family. Everyone did in the past; the prayers of a country supporting seven people. Have their deaths been announced? Do the pious people here know that their former leader has been killed?

How long before the Soviets attempt to suppress religion entirely? Even if the new government does not believe in God, the people still do, and if the government sees this as a misplaced higher loyalty, will they retaliate? Would the sanctity of this church stop them, or would the walls be riddled with bullet holes, the priests taken away for sedition, the mosaic floor streaked with blood, the gates to the altar broken down, the two hanging lamps smashes, the holy books burned in the center of the room, the smoke from their fire smearing itself across the paintings.

God, you can let the monarchy be destroyed, but not the church's, save their beauty and the people's faith.

In the corner there are rows and rows of candles, some freshly burning, some almost extinguished. All of them represent petitions offered by those with money to spare. Olga reaches out and quickly swipes her finger through one flame. It does not hurt. The sensation of heat is there, so some of her sense are still in working order, but there is no pain. Her skin does not burn either. She keeps testing her new body like this, in small ways, trying to find something to convince herself that she is still alive. She will stick her finger in one flame, but she cannot bring herself to put her whole hand in yet.

Olga cannot light a candle without drawing attention to herself, but she can kneel down, and she does, in a corner so no one will trip over her invisible body.

Help us, God, help us, help us find our family and figure out what is going on. What caused this? Did we do something to cause this. I'm so sorry; is it our fault? Keep Mama and Papa and Alexei safe. Are they with You? I hope so and yet I do not, I want them here, helping us figure out this situation Help us, help us, help us, help.

There is no answer. Her head is as silent as the empty Winter Palace that they searched last night.

The gates of the altar are closed to everyone but the priest, but now, invisible, she could enter this forbidden sanctum. She could kneel in front of the tabernacle itself, directing her prayers with no intermediary. But that is sacrilegious, and she cannot go there as a lay person, and certainly not as a woman. Maybe not as a ghost either.

The church does not comfort her. She cannot stop imagining the new government attacking churches and more innocent people who are deemed to oppose their regime because they love the wrong things: their religion, or Tsar, or property. She hates the thought that what happened to their family might happen to others, and hates the fact that she can do nothing to stop it.

Once, while learning about history, she remarked that she was glad that she lived in modern times, because people were nicer now than they had been in the past. And now, now the absurdity of that statement makes her want to cry.

She stays on her knees. They do not hurt, her back does not tense, and her muscles do not cramp. She could stay here forever, not moving. Her sisters kneel down too, and they pray out loud, various prayers no louder than they would have if their voices were alive and audible.

"Let's go." Says Anastasia finally, standing up. "We're not going to find anything here. It's just the same as it was, except people don't bow to us anymore."

Olga wants to scold her for being flippant inside a church, we're not visible, and if you saw a ghost, would you bow to it? But Anastasia is right. This church, like the Winter Palace, is a part of Old Russia, and old Russia is gone.

Their footsteps echo on the marble floor but she does not feel the need to walk slowly to muffle them. No one turns and looks at them approaching. They leave, crossing themselves with holy water, but feeling no better.

Outside the church the activity of the street continues. My country. My people. In life she worried that she would be married off to secure an alliance and sent to a far away from Russia. Now she realizes that you can lose a country without setting foot outside it. She can look for her country at the farthest ends of the earth but she will not find it. The only reliques left, royal objects, pictures, their palaces will become museums and collectibles, things from another age, like the bones of frozen extinct animals that are found and Siberia and sent to faraway institutions to be studied.

The girls watch at the people passing, free to stare as much as they like without the other pedestrians sensing their gazes.

Olga sees a soldier.

He does not wear a uniform, but she can tell that he was in the war by the way he carries himself, the proud military bearing that is married only by his slight limp, no doubt acquired in battle. It is impossible to tell how old he is. Prabably much younger than he looks. War ages you. Olga has seen so many men like him while working in the hospital. She was in love with one.

Dmitri Chakh-Bagov. Mitya. Golden Mitya.

She met him while working in the hospital during the war. There were so many soldiers, so many wounded. Of course many men fell in love with the nurses, if only briefly, and many of the women too, with their patients.

But she had hoped that Mitya truly had feelings for her, not only caused by the trauma of war. In the hospital she ceased to be a Grand Duchess, or a political traitor as she was later, and became just a nurse, another patriotic citizen doing her part for the country. When she donned her nurse's uniform with its white habit, she could be ordinary. With Mitya she could be just another wartime love story, the soldier and the nurse. But her fantasy always ran out when she and Tatiana stepped out of the hospital, in fancy tailored clothes, into their carriage sent by the palace servants, back to their palace.

Mitya joked with her, that he was a Russian soldier and had a duty to defend the royal family including her, even if she did not want him to. "I will kill Rasputin for you, just say the word!" he vowed.

Olga had laughed. "Please do not kill anyone, except the Germans."

He did not get a chance to fulfill his promise, as Father Gregori was killed by multiple assassins, and the joke was no longer funny for Olga to remember.

They stayed in touch after he was discharged from the hospital, and she remembers being so excited to receive his correspondence, even jumping around the room like a child, "I am having a stroke! Is it possible to have a stroke this young?" She and cried, clutching his letter.

After she departed for Siberia, she forgot all about him. So much for love. Infatuation is not important when you could be killed at any moment. She has no idea where he is now. Hopefully safe. Will he remain the army, fighting to defend the new regime? He will not have a duty to defend the royal family now.

The soldier passes the sisters and Olga gestures to Tatiana saying, "He reminds me of Mitya."

Tatiana glances at the man and says, "Oh- Mitya, yes." Olga remembers that Tatiana was in love too, with a different soldier. But she does not seem to be thinking of him now and says, "Wait, I want to try something." She steps forward and tugs on the man's sleeve, not hard, but enough to get his attention. He turns around, staring right at Tatiana. Not seeing. Olga realizes what her sister was trying to do. So we can touch people and they can feel it. After a moment the man shakes his head and walks on. Again, the rationality of the brain. It cannot see anyone, so no one must be there.

"Interesting," says Tatiana. Olga resolves to be more careful not to brush by anyone. She does not want to be an unseen ghostly presence tricking people.

It feels strange to talk when the people on the street cannot hear them. It feels rude, like deliberately speaking in a foreign language. Olga could follow people around screaming and they would not notice. The absolute freedom being a ghost has given her is terrifying, and she wants to shove it away, and return to exile. And on the other hand, she can do anything, anything, and she wants to go smash the windows of every government building. Down with the Soviets!

Once, after leaving the hospital after their shift, she and Tatiana entered a nearby store. They were not recognized. "We should buy something!" Tatiana said, and Olga agreed, reveling in this charm of ordinariness. But they had no money with them and would have had no idea what do with it anyway. They could not play act at being normal for long.

Olga is not tired from walking. The girls could walk all the way across Russia, to Yekaterinburg even, to find out what happened to their bodies. Or they could ride a train, unseen, for days. But the thought of going so far away from, she already thinks of the Winter Palace as home again, terrifies her.

And if they found the bodies? She could not even handle the gore of the operating theater at the hospital for the entire war, how would she handle the mental strain of standing over her own mutilated corpse? Just the thought makes her mind run away in terror.

They reach the palace grounds and squeeze through the gap in the fence once more.

Home safe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Historical Notes:
> 
> Google 'the church of the savior on the spilled blood.' It's pretty fancy. There are no chairs in Orthodox churches. Historical Dmitri Chakh- Bagov has no relationship to Fictional Dmitri from Anastasia. Olga worked as a nurse for a time, then after suffering mental strain, worked as the hospital administrator.
> 
> Author's Notes:
> 
> I've increased my word count goal because I like to suffer. So you all will be gettinga lot more of this story. Thanks to my beta, ElizabethAnnSoph. Go to thedragonscosplay on DeviantArt to see the full version of the last three cover images. Go to the file, 'OTMA."


	4. Chapter 4

Tatiana hates being dead.

She hates being trapped between two worlds. She hates doing nothing. She hates the thought of doing nothing until the end of the world. She hates the feeling of life, the life of the world, slipping past her.

She watches as her sister all adjust to their situation in different ways.

Olga reads constantly. The palace still has all of its books. Of course the looters did not want them. Old knowledge is not valuable now.

It seems as though Olga wants to read every one of their library's volumes. Anything to take her mind away from the present, Tatiana guesses. Absolutely anything. Tatiana finds her in one of their old sitting rooms one day, laying on the floor, a thick volume open in front of her. "What's that one about?" Asks Tatiana, nudging it with her foot.

"The collection of taxes in the Ottoman Empire," replies Olga, not looking up. Tatiana thinks that her sister is joking, but after craning her neck, the words on the page do appear to be on this subject.

Tatiana does not know if Olga really cares about such a thing; it is possible as Olga was always a very good student, or if immersing herself in the words of someone else is her way of quieting all the voices in her head.

Olga is always reluctant to talk about their current situation. Tatiana does not press her. In life Olga suffered from 'melancholy,' as the doctors called it, chronic sadness, related to the stresses of nursing the wounded soldiers. Tatiana cannot imagine how dying must have affected her mind.

Maria tries to pretend everything is the same. Just as she did in Siberia. Even as the new government took control and their entire world crumbled around their family. Maria was always the cheerful one, comforting them all. She is the same now. Death cannot take this away from her. She washes their original clothes, they do not need washing, and combs her newly long hair, it does not need combing. At first she plays the piano, but Olga makes her stop, because the noise could be heard by someone passing. Then she just sings, all types of songs. A singing ghost. But Tatiana knows she is scared, beneath her cheerfulness. But Maria will deny it if Tatiana tries to bring it up, and so she leaves this sister alone too. Her singing is not bad sounding.

Anastasia seems to enjoy their new lives the most. She was always the scoundrel, the daredevil, the shvibzik, the imp. Now, she cannot be restrained, she cannot get caught, and she cannot get hurt. And she takes risks. The human mind holds the body back from doing extreme things. There are amounts of weight that can be lifted, but the mind simply will not allow the body to lift, because it knows that this action will injure. But their new bodies cannot be injured. Even their bullet holes do not hurt. Tatiana found a dull pair of scissors and had Maria cut her hair into bangs so her hair permanently covers the wound in her temple.

Anastasia seems to find their situation almost a grand game, a fantastic joke that the universe is playing on them. Her wild spirit, before controlled in part by parents and the strict expectations placed on them by her societal station, is free now.

But she grieves for their old life, as must as the rest of them. One day, the girls discover a hole in the roof of the palace, and Anastasia climbs up on stacked furniture to reach it and block it with a piece of board.

She scrambles up the pile, and reaching the top, pulls herself up, her head and shoulders disappearing into the sky, her legs dangling in the free air.

"Anastasia, get down!" Tatiana exclaims. Her sister was only supposed to jam the board in the hole, not climb through it.

But Anastasia swings her legs up and disappears completely, now staying on the palace roof.

"Or what?" She yells back down. "I'll die? We couldn't have that!"

And then her voice stops abruptly. She's fallen, Tatiana thinks. She's fallen, but she won't be dead, only her body will be damaged, and she'll have to exist in her smashed body forever.

Her thoughts jump to conclusions like this more and more. Having been killed, she always assumes that the worst has happened. But a second later her sister's face reappears, serious now, and she clambers back down, pulling the board across the hole.

"There are flags everywhere," Anastasia reports bitterly. "Their flags. And our city looks- different."

The girls rush to window, and Tatiana sees red flags with their golden emblem displayed by houses facing the street. Later they find out, from a newspaper borrowed from a stand, that there was a scheduled government parade and therefore the flags were likely ordered hung by the Soviets themselves, but the sight was still unnerving. Tatiana wonders how the home and store owners felt, being forced to display this new proletariat banner. Did they submit, yes, comrade, our windows just through here, or did they refuse. Could they even refuse?

She sees her sisters less and less. At first the girls stuck together constantly, not wanting to be alone, but now they move through the place in their own orbits. There is no need to reconvene for meals or sleep.

Tatiana wanders, alone with her thoughts, her mind trying to seize on something to do, something to fix their current situation. There are so many rooms in this palace. She never noticed before, how much they had. Why did our family need thousands of rooms? Over a thousand rooms for a family of seven gives them each about two hundred and fourteen rooms.

She explores the servants' quarters too, and they are so much plainer, more like their rooms in the House of Special Purpose.

The sisters have lost the hope that they will be suddenly taken up to heaven if they stay together. They do not go to church anymore. In the beginning they tried, earnestly, going back with covered heads, wearing their original white dresses. They stood and knelt, sang and repeated the responses- did everything but receiving communion- but it was ghastly, like they were mocking the service, as if they were play acting. Tatiana refuses to go after the first time, and the other three sisters give up soon after, even Maria.

She still prays, not on her knees, but in her mind, with her thoughts acting as an endless stream of consciousness to God, save us, save Mama, Papa, Alexei and all of Russia, why did you do this to us, what have we ever done, on and on.

Time is different when you are a ghost. If she is not doing anything specific, time seems to move fast. Since she spends most of her time wandering around, time moves quickly, and the days slip into each other, blending together. She has been dead for over a month, she thinks.

Perhaps I can just slide through until the end of the world. But if Tatiana is engaged in something, such as talking to her sisters, time moves at its regular pace.

Time slows down when she is walking around one day at the back of the palace and hears sounds outside a door. The same door that they have been using to enter and exit, the door that they left unlocked because they could not find a key, because no one seemed to care about the palace anyway.

But now she freezes as she hears someone say, "Unlocked! I told you!"

Looters, is her first thought. Soldiers would have keys. How dare they, how dare anyone come into our home, and she rushes over to the door, ready to drive away these people however she can, let them see that the Winter Palace is haunted, but then the door opens and she sees a young woman, maybe Marie's age or near it, her eyes darting around furtively as she peers into the palace. Behind her is boy, about the same age, looking apprehensive.

Tatiana stares at them, unseen.

"I just want to look around," says the girl. "Before they destroy this place, or turn it into a government building." Tatiana hears the open contempt on the they in her sentence, notes the lack of any sort of sack with which to carry away stolen objects, and the time of day - broad daylight- and decides that these people are not looters. She stands aside, although it does not matter.

From listening to their conversations she learns that the girl is named Katya, and the boy, Petya. They are brother and sister or so she thinks; their interactions remind her of Anastasia and Alexei together.

Alexei.

She has not thought of her brother, or the rest of her family, in what seems like forever. She is forgetting what is it like to be human, to feel pain, hunger, time, and loss. She will continue to forget, until she slowly fades out of existence entirely, becoming no more than a passing gust of wind in a falling down palace.

Stop. What makes me think like this? I am still here. I still exist.

Tatiana follows the living pair as closely as she dares, as they begin to explore the palace. The girl is awestruck, and the boy is apprehensive. "What if the soldiers catch us?"

"Then we will say that we saw other entering the building and followed them, doing our duty as good citizens.' Katya does not even slow down as she speaks, and Tatiana knows that here is a girl who is accomplished in lying. Which is wrong. But she would be lying to the government. Which is all right. I guess.

The siblings move through the palace, partly with the air of museum visitors, partly with the air of pilgrims at a church. It does not bother Tatiana that these people have come into her home, because these people respected her father's rule, and it pleases her to know that still in part of the country, her country, there are those that dislike the red and gold flag. Even if they are only two young people sneaking around an abandoned palace.

"I loved them, you know?" Says Katya fiercely, as they explore the palace's private chapel, which is bigger than some churches in the countryside. Tatiana does not go here much. "The whole family, but especially the girls."

Petya, the boy is not listening, and Tatiana senses that he has heard her talk about this hundreds of times. But she feels that Katya does not mind, as she is not really saying it for him.

"They were everywhere, in the papers, on collectables, their pictures in shop windows, even in churches," Yes, yes we were. "And I looked up to them, the older two definitely, but I felt like I could have been friends with them- all four of them- too."

"And now they're just- gone, because of the government, the stupid-" Tatiana sees that her eyes are hard, burning, hears the discontent in her voice, like she heard from the crowd storming the Winter Palace thirteen years ago, but on the opposite side of things. This girl could have been a good revolutionary.

"Yes, whatever you say, let's go, we're stayed too long." Petya does not care about dead dynasties.

Tatiana glances out one of the many windows, and sees the light outside, and the shadows, longer now. He is right. She does not want them to leave. She misses other people, other living people. She wants them to stay, to bask in their aliveness for as long as she can.

"Fine," replies Katya. But she glances around looking for something, "I wish that there was something that I could take-,"

"Stealing from the Winter Palace runs contrary to respecting the royalty." Petya is already walking back the way the had come.

"Not to steal, not to sell on the black market, just something that I could have, something small, to remember when we snuck into the Winter Palace. " But the corridor they are standing in is plain compared to the rest of the palace, with only a few portraits lining the walls, and she cannot take those.

Impulsively, Tatiana takes hold of a string of pearls sewn onto the bodice of her dress- she is wearing the fancy white dress, she does change her clothes sometimes, for variety, if nothing else- and yanks. The strand breaks off but the pearls must be glued together somehow because they do not burst apart. She runs in front of Katya and places the strand down on the ground, knowing that when it leaves her hand it will become visible.

Katya does see it, and her eyes flick around the room, because this object was not there a second ago, and Tatiana smiles at her invisibly, knowing that this girl will not attribute this to ghosts, but to an oversight of her vision. She snatches it up and dashes after her brother, two young people running down the palace hall just like she and her sisters once upon a time. Tatiana follows them outside, through the grounds to the edge of the property. And she stops. They can continue on, back home to family, and supper, to grow, and exist and change the world. And she cannot not.

She watches their two figures hurry away from the palace in the fading light. She touches the loose threads on her bodices that used to hold the pearls in place. Tatiana walks back towards the palace, thinking.

She thinks about Katya. She thinks about the street, lined with red and gold flags. She thinks about the old women in churches, untouched by the regime outside. She thinks about her new body, impervious to cold, pain, and hunger. She thinks about the other three members of her family-dead- in all likelihood. She thinks about spending the rest of her undead existence in a forgotten palace. She thinks about losing her mind altogether. She thinks about the House of Special Purpose in Siberia, with its basement, riddled with bullet holes.

Her footsteps echo down the halls, making more noise than she has in weeks, as she searches for her sisters. They are gathered in the same room that they first woke up in, in the jumbled sitting room. This place has become their main room. They are together, but each is in her own private space, far away.

Tatiana steps through the doorway. If she had breathe she would inhale. If she had a heart it would be beating rapidly.

"Girls," She says, "We are going to recover and bury our bodies."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Historical Notes:
> 
> Shvibzik meaning imp was a nickname for Anastasia
> 
> Maria was nineteen at the time of her death.
> 
> Kayta and Petya are my Original Characters.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey everyone! If you could take a moment of your time tell me how you found this story, through random searching, or a friend's recommendation, or whatever. Please tell me in the comments!

The train’s car rocks as it transports its passengers- living and dead- east. 

It no small feat that she managed to get her three sisters on this train at all, Tatiana thinks. 

After her announcement, she was met with three astonished faces, and their arguments quickly followed.

“But, Tatiana, why?” Said Maria, rising first and walking towards Tatiana, already ready to console, to appease.

“Why not?” Tatiana replied fiercely, looking from face to face. “We’re just sitting here, in limbo, why shouldn’t we?”

Why not proved to be her most useful argument. No one will catch them, and invisible as they are, they cannot be killed, or jailed, or tortured, or banished. 

“And our bodies,” she said. “There is no way that they buried us. We are somewhere in Siberia.” Somewhere…

"I’ll go.” She won over Anastasia first. Of course Anastasia wanted an adventure, and did not mind the macabre nature of their excursion. 

Olga and Maria were firmly opposed. Olga because of she did not want to deal with the gore, the horror- both physical and physiological- of burying her family and herself, and Maria because going on this quest would hardly help to put the past behind her. 

Of course neither of them said as much, not in words. Instead they said, “How will we find where we were put?” and “We don’t know how to dig graves.”

But Tatiana knew them as she knew herself, and she knew that these were her sisters’ reasons.

What gave you this idea?” Questioned Olga, annoyed that Tatiana was bringing new thoughts into their established routine. 

But Tatiana could not explain what about seeing Katya and Petya filled her with purpose again, and only responded: “Who else will give us a final resting place?” 

And finally Tatiana made it plain that she meant go- with or without their help. She knows that while they may not want to follow her to Siberia, to the scene of their murder, they also do not want to see their group split apart further. 

“In stories,” Maria spoke up finally. “Ghosts sometimes cannot rest because they are not properly buried, so maybe we were kept here for this, and maybe if we do-“

“We can finally leave,” finished Anastasia. 

Tatiana had not considered this, but perhaps…It does fit. This could be their purpose. Why they were sent back. Why they cannot move on. 

Olga and Maria agreed, finally. Their fears were overcome by wanting to see their family again. 

Even that was not the end of it. The dumping ground of royal bodies was hardly public knowledge. And so they broke into the Saint Petersburg secret police office. Or rather, walked in, found the largest office, waited until the man inside of it stepped out, and rifled through his filing cabinets. 

Their family was found under one file- the sisters individually are not important to the government- Romanov. 

There were so many files, so many names. Some the girls recognizes, but most were unknown. What will happen to all the people categorized in these files? What has already happened? 

The girls left as quickly as they had come, taking the file with them. Tatiana felt more alive than she had during all of her second life. Sneaking around with her sisters brought so many memories, and she could pretend that she is alive again, and they are playing some trick on parents, or servants or tutors, and together, they are invincible.

Back at the palace, Tatiana opened the file, carefully, gingerly, placing it on a gilt table. Her sisters crowded around her. And they read.

The beginning of the file contained information pertaining to their arrest and exile. Of course most of it is known to the girls- they lived through it- but they read through it anyway, reading about their family when they lived. 

Following a section describing their executions, which even Tatiana cannot bring herself to read, a final page dealt with the disposal of the bodies. There were others in the basement with them, four loyal servants, and she feels guilty that in the last months, these four who have not even been in her thoughts, I thought they might be spared. But the file details that they were shot as well. Eugene, Anna, Alexei, Ivan. I am so sorry. They were killed for no other reason but their refusal to abandon their family. She wants to cry. She does not. She can cry later. 

Continued: 

All clothes were removed and burned...Bodies were transported to an abandoned mine shaft, where upon they were thrown down, however shaft failed to conceal corpses… burned with sulphuric acid to destroy recognition...

Tatiana stops reading, horrified. Sulphuric acid poured on her naked body, eating away at her face. She cannot imagine doing that to another human being. Even to a dead body. 

...transported to second shaft, but this too failed to be an effective hiding place… and the last typed sentences: On July 19th, nine bodies were buried, in a nearby location. The Tsarvitch, Alexei, and a girl-

Who? Her brain cried. Who?

...were buried in a second grave. 

There was a handwritten note at the bottom of the page, in fresher ink: The Whites have since taken Yekaterinburg. While the Ipatiev house has been searched, their soldiers found nothing. 

The girls were quiet. Tatiana cannot faint, but she wanted to, to pass out, to forget their circumstances for a few minutes, but this makes it easier- they do not actually have to dig graves. 

“Well.” She said into the awful silence. “We will go to Yekaterinburg. And we will search near abandoned mine shafts. We have eleven bodies to find. We are to bury the dead." The last of the corporal works of mercy. It does not just mean creating graves, it means visiting graves, leaving flowers, praying for the dead. Religion is on her side. 

They did not return the file. Tatiana hoped that its disappearance is discovered and confounds the Soviet’s Saint Petersburg office. 

So, with this fixed location in mind, they boarded a train. The difficulty of this task reminded Tatiana of their sheltered upbringing. They puzzled over train schedules and route maps, while standing side by side with other travelers who knew exactly where their destinations were and how to get to them.

And now here they are. 

It is Tatiana’s first time traveling as a regular passenger. As the royal family, they had private transportation, and as prisoners, they certainty could not be transported regularly. 

Now they sit in empty seats at the back of one of the train’s cars. Tatiana watches the landscape flow past her, not bothered by any human travel complaints: she is not hungry or motion sick or tired. She will never be any of these things ever again. 

They have not planned out any farther than getting to Yekaterinburg and finding the bodies, but this does not worry her. Something will present itself. We have all the time in the world and there are a finite number of mine shafts near the Ipatiev House. 

Death has removed so many anxieties. Here the four girls are: unaccompanied young women hitching a ride of a train, considered criminals by the government, going to visit the mass graves of eleven brutally killed bodies. 

This does not bother Tatiana. It does not even weigh heavily on her mind. There is a task to be completed, and as with so many gruesome tasks in the hospital, she will see it done. As in the hospital, she will cry afterwards, in private. And then she will carry on. 

Tatiana sees a woman and her baby.

She has seen so many like this mother, during the war when she helped refugees after they were displaced. The masses of frightened people, the old, the children. She never dreamed that she one day would be one of them, escorted by soldiers after a long illness, and herded into a train bound for Siberia. Losing everything except her family. 

The refugees she saw all had suffering inscribed in their faces. 

And her young heart bled for them, these people, her people. I wrote a plea which was put in the paper. I wrote about our duty to help the poor. 

And others gave, because I was their dear Grand Duchess and they loved me.

Did her efforts help? Where are these people now? Now her country is still fighting, no longer against the Germans, but Red against White, blood against bone. Fighting against itself. 

She cannot help the wounded or the refugees from this war. 

The woman that Tatiana watches holds her baby with one arm, and has the other wrapped around a basket from which a white goose sticks its head out. Even first time traveler Tatiana is quite sure that animals are not allowed on passenger trains, but this woman seems as if she could take on any conductor that might try to remove her.

She does not doubt that this woman is coming home into the east; she does not have the look of a city dweller. Her face is hard, and she could be between twenty five and forty. This woman has been fighting- the climate, hunger, poverty- her whole life. She has survived. Tatiana hopes she will continue. What would this hard faced peasant woman, with her baby and her goose, do against the Soviets? 

Another passage from their file flits through her resting mind.

To prevent accusations of cruelty the people were not told of deaths of the Tsarina, Tsarvitch, or Grand Duchesses. The death of the Tsar alone was disseminated in an attempt to quell revolutionary sentiments in the population as well as lower White moral… The remainder of the royal family was reported moved to a safe location…

The girls have been moved to a safe location, safer than the Ural Regional Soviet could imagine. The hand of fate has placed them somewhere they cannot be hurt again. 

Tatiana thinks: their bodies were hidden to prevent political unrest. She thinks: Yekaterinburg is now under control of the Whites. And if their bodies were to be found by the Whites and their murder to become public knowledge… very bad things could result for the Soviets. 

The train continues on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Historical Notes:
> 
> The fate of the Romanov bodies and their servants bodies was as I described it. 
> 
> The White Army took Yekaterinburg six days after the Romanov’s execution. 
> 
> The Soviets did not tell the Russian people of the entire family’s murder. 
> 
> Ipatiev House= The House of Special Purpose. 
> 
> Tatiana gave, and encouraged the Russian people to give to the refugees caused by World War One.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AN: Hi everyone! Thought I would tell you that there's a Broadway musical of the Anastasia cartoon. I've seen it and parts of it are very good. Search, "Dave Malloy Anastasia bootleg." and it should come up.

Four former Grand Duchess exit a train car in a Yekaterinburg station. They wear finely tailored white dresses, not similar but not identical. Their hair is long, and varying shades of brown. They are the last of the passengers to disembark, being careful not to touch any of their fellow travelers.

Their faces are individually apprehensive, determined, frightened, and excited. One, the determined looking one, steps to the front of their group and leads the other three towards the exit. Their manner is odd, as if they have not been with people in a long time; they move through the crowd as if it does not exist. When they do speak, quietly and only to each other, their speech would seem fantastical if it could be heard by an outsider. They talk of ghosts, and graves, of houses of murder, and of lost dynasties.

These girls are Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova. They are dead.

"But how do we get there?" Olga asks as she follows Tatiana- reluctantly, as she still likes this plan the least of all of them- across platform. Her words bounce off the high arched roof of the train station.

"Look, there are maps here-"

"Ipatiev house won't be marked-"

"But the streets near it will be."

"And what will we do when we find them?" Olga was mostly silent on the train, reading another one of her books, but now her questions spill over, threatening.

"Listen," says Anastasia, Tatiana's ally in this. She told Anastasia about her idea on the train. "We search near the House for abandoned mine shafts, we find the two graves, and then we notify a priest so we can have last rites."

And to notify the Whites of the location of the graves, so this cruelty of the Soviets may be exposed.She does not add She does not know the last part of the plan. Tatiana did not tell her. It is too new, still percolating in her mind, but it thrills her, and she wonders if this is the reason why they were kept back. To oppose the Soviet regime. Being a vengeful ghost is slightly better than a ghost with no purpose.

"By writing the priest a letter, a letter, not by scratching something into the floor," She hears Anastasia clarifying.

Tatiana has been writing and re-writing drafts of both letters- she will write one to the Whites also- in her head during their days on the train, but she has nothing final yet. One of her sisters will know what to say.

They exit the station. Outside the air is cooler- August is past now- and they begin to walk, peering at the paper map for street names they recognize.

Her white dress swished against her legs as they walk along the street, searching for street names they remember from their lives before. The dresses were Maria's idea. She insisted on them wearing what they were when they awakened- awakened we still do not have a correct term for it. Maria thought that it would increase their chances of being sent back. Tatiana agreed, not mentioning the strand of pearls she had ripped off and was now with the girl Katya somewhere in Saint Petersburg. The universe would not detain her merely for a bit of beading, surely?

That would be poetic, like in a folk tale. If Maria is correct, and the girls do die after they find their graves, the whole experience would resemble so many of the stories Tatiana heard in her childhood.

Once upon a time, years ago in Russia, there was a wise Tsar with a wife, four daughters and a son. And the kingdom was happy. But then evil men rose up against the Tsar, killing him and his family. However, the evil men could not kill his four daughters. They were reborn as ghosts. No one could see or hear them, and they could not be harmed. Their names were Olga, who was smart, Tatiana, who was beautiful, Maria who was kind, and Anastasia, who was brave. And one day, being very angry at the men who killed their family, Tatiana, the second eldest, hatched a plan to get revenge on the new rulers.

"Tatiana?" Says Anastasia's voice, bringing her out of her story. They have walked to Ipatiev House in an incredibly fast time. Tatiana had been thinking, and had not noticed the walk.

Ipatiev House. The House of Special Purpose. Where their family lived for over two months. It looks as she remembers it, with a high wooden fence, pointed on the top, like sharp teeth, to protect it from prying eyes. Looking above the fence, she can see the upper windows, painted over so the occupants could not see out. Or so no one could see the prisoners inside.

While not visible from the outside, there is a small garden. We could go out for daily exercise, but only briefly.

She does not want to enter. Technically, they do not have to, they can spread out and search for the mineshafts, but in the interest of getting closure…

I need a pen. Tatiana tells herself. And sheets of paper for the letters.

At the fence is by one bored looking guard patrolling the perimeter, a White guard, he will not mind if we go inside. As he turns the corner, away from the, they approach the gate. It does not appear to be locked, and when Maria steps forward and pushes at it, it opens. Slightly more well guarded than the Winter Palace, but we can still get in. The inside looks more or less as she remembers, except dirtier, there is a thin layer of dust on the floor, undisturbed by footprints. It looks smaller. This house does not contain her anymore.

She remembers the countless hours she spent here, most of them boring, writing in letters and diaries, nothing to write, nothing new, but some of them happy, such as celebrating Anastasia's seventeenth birthday, and then on the final night, being awoken, told to pack, you are being moved to a safer location, dressing, being led down into the basement to wait for a truck, a truck that never came. Mama asked for chairs, and they brought them, Yurovsky told them where to stand, posing us, which Tatiana had not even found odd at the time. Their death sentence was read. She felt fear, then pain, then nothing.

They walk around the house, going up the stairs and seeing their old rooms, but they are only procrastinating. The basement sits, gaping like an open wound. Waiting.

It is not too dark, and of course darkness is no longer an obstacle for any of them, but they slowly, as if they were walking in the dark. Tatiana is holding the hand of the sister behind her- Olga?- she thinks.

The room is torn apart. The wallpaper has ripped away from the walls under the hail of bullets, and the wood underneath it is pockmarked with holes. There are black streak marks on the ceiling, from the smoke of the guns. Only the floor is clean; the wood has a striped look to it, as if it was scrubbed hard. She knows the incredible amounts of blood that can come from a human body, and wonders how they managed to wash away the mess from eleven.

The chairs are gone, as are the newly packed bags they carried. Not even a single jewel from the secret folds and false hems on their clothes remains on the floor.

It terrifies her how quickly cruelty can be covered up, how floors can be scrubbed and bodies buried, and deaths forgotten. Tatiana touches her pocket containing, the pen, ink, and paper, that she took from a drawer. These deaths will not be forgotten. "Let's go."

The next part of their mission is more clear cut, although more macabre. The Ipatiev house is on an ordinary street with no mine shafts in sight. They will have to search the surrounding wilderness for mineshafts, but after that the graves will be relatively easy to sight, as the ground will have been disturbed. She hopes. She does not know how quickly a grave is covered by the land again It has been a month, or two, maybe. The weather feels colder, and the leaves of the trees they passed on the train were autumn colors.

After they find the graves, they will write two letters, and deliver them to White soldiers, how she does not know exactly yet, and to a priest- this part is easier. There are plenty of churches here.

As they exit the House, Tatiana announces the second part of her plan, the part involving corresponding with the Whites about their hidden graves to aid in the destabilization of the Soviet regime.

This goes over surprisingly well, even Maria who did not want to change their normal routine agrees. Olga does not ask logistical questions, and Tatiana is glad, because she does not know what she will do if the Whites believe it is trick do not send soldiers. Perhaps she and her sisters can haunt White buildings as vengeful ghosts. Or, more gruesomely, they can dig up the bodies themselves, and bring them to the soldiers.

"What do mine shafts look like?" asks Maria, as Tatiana leads them on, in what she believes is the direction of the woods. None of them have ever seen a mine.

"And where are we going? The report didn't say where the mine shafts were," Maria says.

"Well," begins Tatiana, "We can go into the woods, and look for holes in the grounds- mine shafts are deep pits, Maria, and then search the surrounding areas or...If we just wrote to the Whites and then they looked for-"

"Or," Olga speaks up. "We could just look for mines on a map." She hold up the book she has been reading on the train. The cover reads, 'Maps of Siberia.' "I looked for mines outside of Yekaterinburg, and found several. There's one fifteen kilometers away- The Four Brothers' Mine."

Tatiana smiles, feeling a rush of love for her sister. Bless Olga and her intellectual mind. Of course mines would be marked on maps. Her means of escape from their reality has proved a great help. "Thank you," She says quietly.

Four brothers, she thinks. Four, like us.

"Fifteen kilometers, would they have gone that far?" Says Maria.

"It's the closest one. We can start with it." Olga says.

They walk. On roads mostly. For fifteen kilometers, following the colored lines on the map. The path is easy to follow. Tatiana thinks of the soldiers in their truck, driving through the night, driving away from a badly done execution, driving purposefully to this mine. Occasionally horse drawn carts pass them, going in their same direction, and while they could hitch a ride, invisible to the driver and horses, they do not. This is a pilgrimage; they are going to the site of martyrs' deaths, and pilgrims must endure hardships.

The sky flares with sunset, darkens, and the stars rise. They walk through the night. The hem of Tatiana's dress is covered kicked up dirt, and so are her white shoes. She goes back to her story:

And so they sisters journeyed to Siberia, back to the city where they had been imprisoned for many months. The evil men no longer controlled this city, and after visiting their old house and finding it empty, they went in search of their graves. The eldest, Olga, through means of a book guided them to the first grave, leagues away from the town.

It is still dark when Olga stops them, on the edge of a wood, thinly populated with trees. "Here, I think."

Ghosts in a dark wood to find dead bodies. Their story becomes more and more melodramatic by the minute. But the forest is not dark, not for them.

The mine is indeed abandoned, but the land has a used look from being disturbed by human activity. The ground is uneven, and a giant hole descends into the ground. Even Tatiana's eyes cannot penetrate the bottom. The Whites searched this shaft, she remembers, but found nothing.

They spread out- not individually but in pair, the Big Pair and the Little Pair, no one wants to be alone in this place- and begin to search. Tatiana thought that perhaps she would be pulled towards the sites by a connecting force, that she would know that they were near, but she feels nothing. This perhaps is worse, she could be walking over her own grave and not even realize it.

"Even if we don't find them, we can still tell the Whites," Olga says as they comb the surrounding area, finding nothing, beginning to despair.

"And their search could be more through," says Anastasia. Their two groups have merged together now, as they wander further from the mine.

Tatiana has missed this. Them four of them being together. She feels closer to her sisters now than in the lonely months they have spent at the Winter Palace, together but apart. And despite the fact that they are so far away from their family, their home, despite their country crumbling around them, here in an abandoned bit of forest with unmarked graves, she feels briefly happy.

"There," says Anastasia, pointing. The spot lies a little way off, an indentation in the ground that would never be looked at twice, that seems perfectly normal except for the absences of grass and the weeds that grow around it have been flattened. Clever, to dig the grave in a spot where weeds grow; they are hardy and would soon over grow the empty patch, gaining nutrition from the large decomposing matter beneath.

It is bigger than Tatiana expected, about three meters across. She approaches it and pokes the ground with her foot, although there can be no real doubt that this is the first grave site. There are nine, twisted, mutilated, broken bodies meters below her feet.. The soil is loose, much looser than hard packed ground in autumn should be. The men who buried them were in a hurry and did not pack down the soil as well as they should have. The grave must be deep, with the bodies buried far enough below to avoid surfacing even despite rain and wind.

Well. This is the first part of their goal, but Tatiana feels no success, only emptiness. She tells herself that of course she does not feel happy at finding a grave, and that it is normal not to. She tells herself that this is because they have another grave to find, harder than the first, and that they must still tell a priest and convince the Whites. She tells herself that she will feel happy then, after all their goals are complete.

"So," asks Maria, as they all stand at the edge of the filled in pit, clearly feeling the same apathy as Tatiana. "Now what?"

"We all spread out and look for the second grave. It should be smaller, but the ground will be disturbed something like this." replies Tatiana. "It's getting light now, and we can meet back at this spot if we're unsucessful." She turns and marches off east of the pit without waiting for the others' confirmation.

She is not mad at them, not really. It is not her sisters' fault that her own plan no longer satisfies her. When she planned this, her brain was alive again, alive with ideas and half written letters, persuading, informing, providing critical information against the Soviets but now- she has just stood over her own grave, and her sisters' and her parents', and their servants' and felt nothing. No revulsion or grief, just dead, like her own nearby body.

As soon as Tatiana is out of their sight, she takes out the paper, ink, and pen taken for Ipatiev House. Setting them down on a flat rock, she begins composing the letter in her head. The one to the Whites is more complicated, and she begins with that one:

While walking in the woods near an abandoned mine in Koptyaki, my dog discovered...

No. Tatiana cannot pretend to be a peasant. Wouldn't a living person have come personally to them?

I know that you have no reason to believe this, and I myself can scarcely comprehend the situation my sisters and I now find ourselves in but, I am the former Grand Duchess…

No. Not one person in their right mind could believe the real story. No ghosts.

She dips the pen into the container of black ink, remembering all the letters she wrote in the House of Special Purpose.

Sirs,

I write to you because of my love of the former Tsar and his family, and my desire to see the guilty brought to justice for their crimes. I understand that you have no reason to believe my claims, but I hope that the proof that can easily be found, as well as my knowledge of classified information will speak to my sincerity…

A girl's voice shouts somewhere, far away. They have found the second grave. But Tatiana keeps writing, not wanting to test if the second site will leave her feeling as empty as the first.

While your men searched the Four Brothers Mine, you neglected to conduct a thorough search of the surrounding area.

Last night my comrades and I-

No. Comrade is a title from their opponents.

My relatives and I discovered two pits which seem to be mass graves not far from the mine shaft…

Besides the enormous political significance of the bodies, I hope you will be able to provide more fitting graves for the royal family than their current location…

I understand that my claim a bizarre one, and I regret that I cannot deliver this or come to you in person, but the situation I find myself in does not allow me to directly interact with others.

With this in mind I have enclosed the secret report authored by the Bolsheviks pertaining to the disposal of our-

their remains.

Keep this in mind, as you decide the veracity of my claim, and ask yourselves what I would stand to gain from so elaborate a scheme.

Finally I ask that the eleven bodies be given Last Rites, if not those befitting royalty, than those appropriate from a common citizen.

Once more, I beg you to believe me, and I hope that this discovery aids your cause in every way possible.

Yours,

A Loyal Russian

It is a good letter. Her tutors would be proud. Their family had hours to practice. They were allowed to send letters outside, although Tatiana did not doubt that these were read.

While she originally planned to write two- the second to a priest asking for Last Rites- it is better if she allows the Whites to handle finding one, instead of trusting in two mysterious letters. And she does not want to write to a priest. She has not been to church in months, and to be honest, she does not want to directly contact a priest. It feels hypocritical to ask for a sacrament meant to bless the dead and aid them into Heaven, when she herself died and escaped eternal judgement.

But as shallow as her faith might be, Tatiana still wants holy water, and incense, candles, and chanting. The ritual is comforting if nothing else.

She picks up her writing supplies and goes to find her sisters. They have gathered at the next grave is about six kilometers away- not far.

It is indeed smaller, holding only two bodies. It looks more like a grave and somehow, seems sadder. Like seeing a baby's tomb with only one date engraved on the stone.

Tatiana does not feel empty here. Instead something in her chest tears, and she realizes that she is part of something that she cannot understand, and that just like her entire life, she cannot control this.

She is on her knees in front of the grave- she cannot remember kneeling down, why would she do this- clutching at the dirt, overwhelmed with everything. Here, finally at an unmarked grave in the Siberian forest, Tatiana finally allows herself to cry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Notes:
> 
> Wow, what a long chapter! We're going to hear from Maria next time. Please leave me review, the more detailed the better. Thanks to my beta, ElizabethAnnSoph
> 
> Historical Notes:
> 
> The Four Brothers' Mine, and the nearby pits: Ganina Yama- Ganya's Pit and Porosyonkov Log- Piglet's Ravine are the real burial sites. However, in this chapter, we're now getting into seriously Alternate Universe territory. The Romanov's graves were not found until 1979 and 2007 respectively. Obviously there were no letters delivered by ghosts, and the Whites did not exhume their bodies to examine them at this time. The second grave in Porosyonkov Log- with Alexei and one of the girls- was not found until much later, and since one of the girl's bodies was missing, this helped to fuel the 'Anastasia survived' rumors.
> 
> In my research I did find out something nice though:
> 
> On the anniversary of the murder, a night-long service is held at the Church of All Saints (Church on the Blood) on the site of the Ipatiev House. At daybreak, a procession walks four hours to Ganina Yama for another ceremony. The former mine pit is covered with lily plants for the ceremony.


	7. Chapter 7

Maria is used to being invisible. As the third princess, neither the eldest, or the most beautiful, or the mischievous one, in her past life she often felt overlooked. She was yet another failure, the third mistake in the line of four unnecessary girls. 

Her birth was the most disappointing, if she was to believe the story Olga told her. When her sex was announced to her father, he did not come to see his wife immediately, but rather taken a walk before coming to meet his new child, and ordering the disappointingly few number of cannon shots to announce her birth. 

 

Since Olga had been angry with Maria when she revealed this story, Maria had asked her mother about it. The Tsarina had deferred, saying that she did not remember the exact details, and that of course Maria was loved and wanted now. 

 

Maria never mentioned it to her father. Of course he loved his four girls; she did not doubt this, but when she witnessed her mother struggle through two more pregnancy, failing again with Anastasia and then the hysterical joy that Alexei’s birth brought- finally a boy!- She could not help but wonder if her parents would have rather skipped the first four tries. 

 

Under the new government, women have been given more rights. Maria marveled at this, and so do the women themselves. “We can vote now, Sasha!” She overheard one young woman say to her companion. “How strange!” 

 

So different from her father’s government, where it was unquestionably her mother’s duty to produce a male heir. These obligatory pregnancies had taken their toll on the Tsarina’s health, and as Maria observed Olga- so confident and kind, working as a nurse and later a hospital administrator, efficient and determined- as opposed to her younger brother- so frail and spoiled by all of Russia- she could not help but wonder why the ruling power could not pass to the eldest child regardless of sex. 

“There are laws,” explained her tutor when a young Maria demanded this. “Created by a Tsar before your father.”

 

But Maria saw her father implement his own laws, creating and undoing a parliament over and over again, and wondered why the Salic Laws held such a sacrosanct palace that they could not be overturned. 

 

She did not ask her father about this, or about her birth. Perhaps she preferred not to know, to confer on him the benefit of the doubt that ignorance bestowed.

 

Anyway now, there is no more right to the Russian throne for anyone, and the Salic Laws are ancient history. The new elections will not be fair; Maria cannot imagine that a complete democratic exercise will be allowed, at least both sexes are equally able to participate in this sham. She would not mind voting; it seemed fun, novel. 

 

Being invisible comes more naturally to her than it does to the other three. So she often takes the daily errand of stealing a newspaper. Maria does not come back immediately. She likes to wander the streets, watching the people. 

 

Tatiana goes out too, but she only has one destination and goes day after day to the Soviet police office where she sits and listens, writing down pages and pages of their goings on. She means to sends them to the Whites, but she has not yet.

 

They are back in Saint Petersburg after their adventure in Siberia. The results were disappointing. Neither Tatiana’s nor Maria’s theory was proven true. The girls did not properly die, and the news of their deaths did not shake the foundations of the Soviet State. 

 

After following the guard at the Ipatiev House back to his post, they left their letter conspicuously on a desk. The Whites, perhaps convinced by the inclusion of the Soviets’ file, took them at their word and sent their men out at once in trucks, combing the woods until they found both graves.

 

And then they began digging. 

 

Maria is glad that she does not sleep, so she cannot have nightmares. The bodies were almost beyond recognition as human, through a combination of decay, acid, gunshots and bayonet wounds. Maria honestly could not tell who the bodies belonged to. The second grave yielded the smallest corpse- Alexei, and one other girl, but they did not know who. 

 

The pits contained personal items too: Eugene’s spectacles, their frames twisted, a fragment of a dress- impossible to say whose - a tiny shard of a precious stone broken from one of their hidden valuables. 

 

The bodies were loaded onto the truck and taken back to the city for more scientific observation. The girls stood in the corner of a laboratory, watching as men laid their bodies on tables, cutting them further open and examining them. A priest was brought, in sworn to secrecy, hastily read them last rites, and sent away. Maria had been to many religious ceremonies and funerals before and she felt nothing at this one. 

 

They waited around, thinking they would be given an immediately burial, but due to the volatile nature of the climate, and the Whites wanting to give them an established grave site, it became clear that they would not see this anytime soon. The bodies were preserved as best as possible and put in a morgue for indefinite storage. It was not an ideal outcome, but the Whites knew about their deaths, and the priest had blessed them. They cannot end the civil war, and so they went home, home being the Winter Palace.

 

Tatiana was angry, angry that their plan had not worked in the earth shattering way she had intended, but for Maria, the trip held a strange form of catharsis. They are dead, and there is no easy way to fix this. She had always been practical, and she now seized the advantages of invisibility with both hands. 

 

Dead she has more freedom than she ever did. Maria does not hesitate to take advantage of this, and goes everywhere: to shops, university lectures, plays, and concerts. She likes to be with the people, in ways that she was never allowed to in life. 

 

She walks along the street now, not feeling the cold in the air that announces the arrival of fall. Their experience with the Whites went as well as they could have hoped for, she thinks. They did not cause their people to rise up against the Soviets, but they did get Last Rites, and informed important people of their deaths. Meddling in living human affairs is harder than it looks. 

 

Their situation is not horrifying to her. Instead it is fascinating. She is interested in figuring out the mechanics of their new life. They can eat; Maria tries it once with an apple lifted from a seller’s cart, but it is unneeded, and feels like eating wood. 

 

The newspaper shop is not far, but she tries to go there in different ways, for variety. The printed words themselves are not that exciting, and so Maria does not feel too bad about stealing one everyday. The presses are controlled, or at least the mainstream ones are.

 

Communism, everywhere Maria heard the word. Communism. In the newspapers, said by people on the street, in university lectures, in red splashed posters plastered on the sides of buildings. She does not understand this word. Of course she had heard it before, and she understood that it brought death and ruin upon their family and country, but she had never been taught what communism was. She doubted that the palace library even owned a copy of this Communist Manifesto that she kept hearing about. 

 

But her family’s library does contain a dictionary, and near the center of it, she found it: a political theory derived from Karl Marx, advocating class war and leading to a society in which all property is publicly owned and each person works and is paid according to their abilities and needs. 

 

This did not really clear things up for Maria. What is class warfare? Why must the classes fight, when instead a king could exercise control over the people, working as a link between the people and God? Each person would work- even the Tsar? But there is to be no Tsar under communism, there was no room for his needs. 

 

Karl Marx….She heard this man’s name often, along with one Fredrick Engles. 

 

How would could everything, or indeed anything be publicly owned? She could not imagine all things becoming nash instead of moi or tvoi. 

 

The dictionary had no answers, so Maria tried to understand this by going to a university lecture. She sat in a hall with vaulted ceilings, like a cathedral, and listened while a small man with a pointed beard used phrases like, ‘the dawn of communism just over the horizon.’ 

 

He talked about landowners and their evils, how they will have their property, their wealth, taken away, their means of oppression seized so they cannot bind the Russian people any more. 

 

If the land now belongs to everyone, does this not mean that we are all landowners, and back where we begun? thought Maria. It was a silly question, and she knew that this communism is not meant to be understood by people like her, that she is- was- part of the ruling class that the small man was now denouncing. This lecture, the posters on the street, the speeches and printed columns in the newspaper were not meant for her; they were for the proletariat, another word that she does not understand. To her all the citizens in Russia were just people, not divided into classes, proletariat, bourgeoisie, ruling. Haves and have nots. 

 

But for all the ‘new winds of change brought on by the revolution,’- this is a phrase from the lecture- the life in Saint Petersburg that Maria sees stays much the same. Even the known deaths- for some word has gotten out, disseminated by the Whites- of the royal family cannot do much to stir the people.

 

Perhaps it is denounced it private; Maria does not hear it proclaimed anywhere. Not even the church, which once so strongly stood behind the Tsar. Once the priest at the altar, an altar in the Church Of the Savior On the Spilled Blood, an altar funded by royal money, and quoted Saint Anthony the Great, saying: “A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.'” The holy man stared out at his congregation piercingly, but he did not mention the royal family who too have spilled their blood. He very well could have been referring to the new rights given to women or any other change in their world. Everywhere people are too lazy or too afraid to speak. 

 

There was a bird trapped in the WInter Palace some days ago. The place is falling apart, little by little, glass panes breaking and wood rotting away. The coming winter will not be good for the palace. The creature must have some through some hole and was unable to find its way back out again. 

 

Tap, tap, Maria heard. Tap, tap, tap. He was a little bird, a sparrow. They had sparrows in Siberia too, although they fled in winter. Maria did not blame them, the Siberian winter was harsh, with cold that burned through too thin walls and their family’s inadequately thin jackets. They were not given enough wood to burn, and wore all of their clothes constantly, even inside. Now, when winter comes Maria can sink her body into the snow that will gather outside the palace in drifts, with no one to plow it, and not feel anything. The girls must insure that they keep at least one door clear of snow. This task will probably fall to Maria and Tatiana as they go out the most. 

 

Tap, tap, pecked the bird, insistently. Soon, very soon he will fly away somewhere warm. Perhaps he should have left already, but he became trapped in the palace, and now he is urgent to make up for lost time. Tap, tap, tap. He hopped back and forth on the window sill. Maria reached out, attempting to cut him in her hands, but he was frightened by this invisible force, and fluttered out of her grasp, circling up to the ceiling. Even now she still cannot fly. 

 

But the bird returned again to the window sill, and she captured him by throwing a jacket over his small body, holding the squirming bundle away from her body even through its pecking cannot hurt her. 

 

She released it out a broken window near the front of the palace. Maybe it had been broken during the looting. The bird flew away, frightened of the building and of her, not knowing that Maria was his salvation. 

 

The girls’ undeath is like that, she thinks now. It saved them from one danger- immediate death, but perhaps let them free into another. It is a clever thought, and Maria is pleased. This is as far as her thoughts go. She does not allow her mind to think about their situation beyond impartial observations. 

 

The newspaper seller’s is empty. Perhaps the people do not wish to hear about war, wrapped in lies. Neither does Maria, but she snatches a bundle of false words anyway and heads back towards the palace. While on the street she sees birds flying south, away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Historical Notes:   
> The story about the Tsar and Maria’s birth is true.   
> The Bolsheviks did give women the right to vote in 1917 (Good on you commies!)  
> In the Cyrillic alphabet, the letter making the ‘k’ sound is near the middle of the alphabet.   
> наш/nash- our.   
> мой/moi- my.  
> твой/tvoi- your.  
> That is a correct quote from Saint Anthony the Great/ Of the Desert. 
> 
> Author's Notes:  
> Please consider adding this to your favorites stories/ recommending to your friends so more people can see this. Thanks to my beta ElizabethAnnSoph.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some reviewer asked me if Alexei is a ghost or not. Hahahahahaha, I know the answer, but why would I tell you?
> 
> On a completely unrelated note, I'm on Patreon and offering a lot of my cosplay and art stuff for small amounts: www.patreon.com/thedragonscosplay

The next week she goes out again, with a new destination. It seemed that Tatiana had not been posting her dutiful notes on the Soviets to the Whites because she did not know how to use the mail system. They never needed too. Letters written to relatives and friends were given to servants- and later the Reds- never sent by the girls themselves. Now though she has pages and pages of her writings, and she enlists Maria’s help.

The postal system was for other people, with its stamps and addresses, but Maria welcomes a challenge. Tatiana did write down the location of the Whites’ headquarters, and the two girls found stamps in a desk drawer in one of her father’s studies. 

This room was unused, both during the temporary government's occupation and by the girls. They are not drawn to rooms where their family used to gather. These places are haunted, more so than the rest of the palace. This room so clearly reminds Maria of her father and the times spent with her family. It is odd to be here with just one sister, yet perhaps they have only come ahead of the other four, any moment now the door will open and Mama, Papa, the other sisters, and Alexei- walking without the aid of his wheelchair- will all enter. They will sit together, perhaps each person absorbed in their own tasks but together, or perhaps Papa will read from some great Russian novel. 

The door remained shut. The room continued to lack five of its usual occupants.

Stamps were not the only thing the desk contained. There were also raw photographs, sent over from official photographers for her father’s approval, before being printed and released to the public. Her sisters’ and brother’s faces mostly, photographed in glowing studio settings, sitting, standing, individually, with siblings, or with relatives. 

A set of negatives showed young Tatiana in various profile shots. All but the chosen one of them were struck through with black lines. Maria saw herself in fancy court dress, photographed on the day of her sixteenth birthday and presentation to the court. She remembers this occasion, falling over in front of everyone, not used to her new thin points of her high heels. But she got up and smiled at everyone, because she was Maria, she was cheerful and unflappable, and she continued on in her light pink dress and pearls. 

Amidst the assorted formal portraits she found a causal one of the four girls. They sit in an opulent room, but their white dresses- not matching that day- draw the viewers towards eyes to them. They have not been posed; Tatiana turns her body toward her sisters away from the piano next to her, Olga’s legs are crossed, Maria’s posture slightly hunched, and Anastasia is standing noticeably apart from the other three. The shot lacks the serenity that always seems to grace their formal pictures. This was taken just before their father’s abdication from the throne, and tensions were evident then, even if none of them knew for certain what was happening. The room behind them has a barren look to it, despite the wrought details in the furniture, the chandelier above Anastasia’s head ,and woven geometric patterns on the rug beneath their feet. The girls in the picture do not know their coming fates. Maria was not sure if she preferred it that way. Their uncertainty carried with it hope, however faint, that things might get better.

“Remember this?” She tilted the photograph towards Tatiana, who was absorbed in attaching stamps to the envelope, a new task for her.

“Maybe. Not really. There were so many photos taken of us together like that.” 

Maria noted the past tense. There were so many photos taken of them, but there will never be again.

“Would you have wanted to know then, everything that was going to happen?” It is a rare question about their circumstances, and their past, especially from Maria.

“If I had known then, about any of it: the arrests, and Siberia, and Yurovsky,” Tatiana meant their deaths when she said Yurovsky, but his name is easier, “I would not have been able to go on. Not with knowing the future. Not with knowing about this.” Tatiana meant their being ghosts when she said this, but a demonstrative is easier.

Maria tried to think of her own answer, would she have been able to survive any of it, knowing that death and being trapped in the world lay at the end? But then, with the shift from the extra ordinary to the mundane that characterizes so much of their experience here, Tatiana handed her the envelope saying, “Is this enough stamps, do you think?”

It was, or at least it looked like the stamped envelops she sees people handing over the counter at the post office, and now Maria walks along a broad Saint Petersburg road to deliver it. 

The building is empty, save for one women in a kerchief dictating the name of her recipient to the worker behind the counter, “yes, ‘A-B-R-A-M…’ ”

Maria pokes Tatiana’s letter into the depository slot, and waits for headscarf women to leave so she does not have to open the door herself and frighten the postal worker. Once outside, Maria decides to follow her, not because of any special interest, but because following ordinary people about their day to day lives is one of her favorite pastimes. This woman walks and walks, past the official building, past stately houses, and expensive shops. This woman must live on the outskirts, the poorer side of Saint Petersburg. She unknowing leads Maria farther than she has ever gone in this city before. Maria feels slightly guilty. The poor are her people too, they are the proletariat, she thinks and she did- does- care about them, no matter than the newspapers say. She should visit them as well.

The woman seems to relax as she walks further away from the nice society that Maria knows. The house she finally enters is smaller than some of the stables in palaces Maria has lived in. It is filled with great activity- a man, girl, and boy are all loading objects into bags, putting the bags into trunks, putting the trunks onto a wagon hitched to one placid brown horse. 

These people are not just poor, Maria realizes, as she hears the woman ordering her children about in a language that is not Russian, or French, or English she studied as a Grand Duchess. She notes the striped shawl under the man’s vest, and the hats he and the boy wear, just different enough from the hats you might see on other men to be noticed. These people are zid, or Jews, if you were feeling gracious toward them which hardly anyone ever was, even among the cultured royals Maria knew. No wonder they are leaving. Even when her father ruled they were hated, and left the country in droves.

Though she does not know the exact stance of the new government on Jews, she knows if the Soviets can reject Christianity, once the universally accepted religion here, these outsiders cannot have it much better. 

These are the people described in the book Protocols in the Elders of Zion, an outline of their plan for total control of the world. Maria attempted to read, since her father was reading it at the time, but gave up almost immediately, as she found it confusing and its arguments scattered. However rambling its style, the book made it clear that Jewish domination was the goal. 

These are the people who killed Christ, the priests told their congregations every Good Friday. These are the people who were to blame for the revolution, those in politics told her father. 

Here before her now are the greedy, grasping, voracious elders of Zion themselves, or perhaps just the man is; the book did not mention Jew women or children. But this small family, now tying their few trunks to their wagon with fraying rope, the elder three with worry and anxiety painted over their faces that does not quite obscuring the sorrow beneath, most certainly does not jive with the scheming, hooked nosed images she has seen accompanying the tale, The Wicked Jew, in her illustrated copy of The Brother’s Grimm. 

Another man comes, and money changes hands, presumably a hastily arranged sale of their property and the pieces of furniture the family leaves behind. This transaction takes place in Russian. Maria does not know much about money, but the amount the first man recieves seems paltry, even for the poor house and its effects.

The woman looks one last time at their house, although it is is so small that it would be hard to have missed anything, and says something to her husband, a short phrase, a command perhaps. That’s everything, let’s go. The girl lifts the boy into the back of the wagon, then climbs into the back herself, arranging her skirts on top of the trunks. Their parents sit in the front; the man snaps the horse’s reigns. 

Their leavetaking is utterly silent. The girl turns her head around so she can keep the house in view for as long as possible, but then the road turns as the cart moves away from Saint Petersburg and her view is lost. Maria follows them easily. The cart is old, and the careful way the man drives it feels as though it has broken in the past and he does not want to risk it again. 

The sun is behind the clouds, but a muted version of its light shines through, giving the landscape a greyish look. The road as they get further from Saint Petersburg is uneven, filled with groves as it had rained recently and the ground had hardened into ruts. 

Another wagon passes by on the opposite side of the road. The boy leans out of the cart and waves. This is all an adventure to him. 

“Where are you going, little man?” The old man riding in the other cart calls over, smiling.

“To America!” Shrieks the boy, answering in Russian. His words shoot into the empty fall sky, circling around and around, America, America, America! 

America, where they overthrew their king centuries ago without killing him. These people are going to the other side of the world. Maria cannot even fathom how far they must go, all the different steps of their journey.

The girl grips her brother’s shoulder and pulls him back into the wagon. She says something to him, scolding maybe.

The unrestrained enthusiasm of the little boy reminds her of Alexei. He was always hurting himself, playing roughly, fighting back when anyone tried to restrain him for fear of his hemophilia. 

But for an accident of birth she and Alexei could have been those siblings. She would be named Miriam, instead of Maria, and speak this other language instead of the Russian. She would look out for her brother as they crossed continents and countries, instead of as he played on the decks of the royal yacht. 

She feels a strange kinship with this family, so different from her own, and yet so alike. Both the Jews and the Tsar were vilified, blamed for the sufferings of the poor, both were driven out of their homes, or forced into leaving. Being royal herself, Maria could not imagine how the Tsar could be at fault, and now looking at the little group in the wagon, talking to each other in words not meant for her, she cannot imagine how the Jews could be either. 

Maria cannot follow this wagon forever. Saint Petersburg has almost disappeared behind her, and she was only going out to post a letter, but she does not want to leave. She wants to stay here, invisible, a guardian angel, supporting the family on their journey across Europe, beyond the Atlantic, into a land not haunted by executed rulers. 

But Maria is not an angel, and so she turns back towards her family, what is left of it. Behind her she hears the women start to sing, but she does not know if it is a song of mourning or of hope. 

Back at the palace she tells Tatiana that she posted the letter and everything went fine. Her long absence is not questioned, and she is glad, for she does not want to speak about what she saw. She would say, “I saw a family of Jews leaving the city today, and I followed them,” but this would not describe emptiness she felt while watching the group depart.

She enters her father’s study, still with the raw photographs spread over his desk, and searches this shelves for a title, titling her head to read the fancy writing on their bindings. She finds it, almost hidden between two other larger volumes. It is a small book, with a paper cover, cheaply printed, the text already fading from solid black to a washed out gray. The front is adorned with six pointed stars, and other symbols, things that she half recognizes from churches, but twisted somehow. Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the text near the bottom reads. She wonders who is responsible for these words, words that can drive a family from their home and cause them to flee halfway across the world.

Taking a seat in her father’s big heavy chair, she positions the book on her lap, open to its middle and tears, a quick, measured motion starting at the top of the spine and ripping downward. She grabs bunches of pages and rips those too, finding that is it easier if the bunches are smaller. Her hands slice across the words, usury, censorship, goyim, domination, calmly bisecting, trisecting them until they are too small to be read, until they are nothing. Even the cover does not escape unscathed. She tears it once vertically, splitting the title into two parts, and then horizontally so the letters and symbols cease to have meaning, and are only curls and lines made of ink. Then she gathers the mess up in her skirt, opens the window and lets the scraps flutter down several stories, where they come to rest on the ground below, like fresh snow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Historical Notes:
> 
> Zid is a historical Russian slur that I discovered while reading Olga’s diary.
> 
> The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a real book, containing manufactured, ‘protocols’ of the plot for Jewish domination of the world. Preceding the Russian revolution, the Tsar’s advisors blamed the Jews for the political turmoil, contributing to a climate of increased anti semitism. Many Jews left, most of them to America. 
> 
> ‘The Wicked Jew,’ is also a real story included in the original Brothers’ Grimm stories. 
> 
> At first I was not going to address the Romanovs’ prejudice. I wanted to my audience to be sympathetic to the girls, and this ugly historical fact was decidedly against that. However, everyone has the capacity for change, and I decided to take chance to show at least one character becoming a little bit better.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi everyone! We have three more chapters left to go, next up is Anastasia. While I have definite ideas about where I want the plot to go, I was wondering if you had anything that you wanted to see? Also, after I finish the story I will be selling it on Amazon as an ebook, (and there will be a bonus chapter with Alexei included!) and I would really appreciate if you would give me any constructive criticism now, because I'd rather hear it from you guys than from an Amazon reviewer.

Maria does not consider herself as a revolutionary, not like Tatiana. She does not think that anything they do can bring down the new government, and therefore it is pointless to try. Honestly, she does not even know if she wants the government overthrown, although she would never admit that to her older sister. What do you want to accomplish? Maria thinks as she posts more of Tatiana’s carefully written notes. There is no more Tsar, or Tsarvitch to take the throne again. The Whites are still fighting back, but not successfully; they are dying, as Yakovsky had said. If they win, and they will not win Maria is certain, she does not know who would rule the country and if she likes the thought of anyone besides her father or Alexei- or Olga-her mind adds, at the head of Russia. 

The people in the streets will seem tired of rebellion. They have rioted once already. Now their government has been given into Red hands and and they seem content to live under the new flag. 

At least most of them. 

She finds the rebels on accident, never having sought out the factions in this city that hated the Soviets. 

One day, as afternoon bleeds quickly into evening, she is walking home from a concert- a government sponsored one- so besides folk songs, and classical music, songs about workers, struggle, and suffering were featured too. One was called The International, a translation of a French song. It was quite long, and its tune monotonous, but its words were frightening to Maria- not god, nor tsar, nor hero...taking back what is ours...parasites on thrones...war to the tyrants! Peace to the people! She was not a worker- all the world's starving and enslaved. She was close enough to- the thrones at our backs erected- that if she could be seen by the the crowd perhaps they would tear her apart- then, murderers, we will point the muzzles of our cannons at you!

The people around her all clapped politely when the choir finished, and Maria wondered how they could listen to the violent lyrics of the song when so recently the old anthem, the Tsarist anthem, my father’s anthem, would have played. Perhaps they just did not care one way or the other as long as they were not the ones who were forced into freezing exile, lined up and shot. 

There were other songs with the same themes, not so aggressive, and they made her see red and gold, and think of victory for her country, which was entirely their point she supposed, although the victory she imagined was not for their side and the words- for us, the sun will forever shine on with its fiery beams- do not bring to mind the proletariat marching to a new dawn, but her family, together on the grounds of Tsarskoe Selo in happier times. 

While going home from this, Maria first assumes that the group of young people walking ahead of her are students. They are all around the same age, all male, and they all wear the clothes she has come to associates with the young men who come and go in crowds around the university grounds while discussing politics. 

But they are not students. Students do not walk with the same air of forced causality, nor are their conversations usually so serious or quiet. Maria’s first thought is that these young men are going to a nefarious establishment meant to be visited by men at night, for in exploring the city she has stumbled upon such places. She was horrified and shocked. Grand Duchesses are not supposed to know about such things. But no, their manner is too grave for visiting a brothel. 

The men reach their destination, a small house on a side street that is lit from within. The door is opened inward by a petite woman who ushers them inside quickly, shutting and locking it again, but not fast enough to bar Maria from entry. 

The room she sees is small, well ordered, and contains another young woman and a man sitting on the sofa. The woman is beautiful with her features smooth like a painting, but Maria’s attention is drawn to the man. There is a thinness about him, not so much his physical body, but rather as if bits of his spirit have been stripped away. He reminds Maria of her mother, how she sometimes looked when she thought no one was watching during their last months in exile. Tired, so tired, but an exhaustion that sleep cannot quench. There is a bruise on his cheek.

“Zhenya!” One of the three men Maria arrived with cries, and the bruised man’s- Zhenya- face arranges itself into happiness as he is embraced by his friends.   
So they have come to visit their friend, who perhaps has been ill. Maria considers leaving- she has never gone into someone’s actual house before, only public buildings, and she feels like a violent intruder here. But why the secrecy? 

“When was he released?” asks one of the men, Boris, in an undertone to the petite women. 

“They brought him back yesterday night. But he had been beaten and was very weak.”

“He will be fine,” interjects the beautiful woman. “They cannot even thrash a man properly.” She is holding Zhenya’s hand, stroking with with her thumb, and Maria sees that both of them are wearing thin bands of gold on their ring fingers.

It is hard together from the conversation of six people exactly what has happened, why they are all gathered here. Their conversation is not meant for an outsider to follow. Maria thinks that this man had been arrested for something, but she cannot figure out what, and he speaks about the conditions of prison, not too bad, he says, and references people and events that are unknown to her. It is like reading a book with every other page missing. It frustrates her that these people are not explaining their lives in a better way for her knowledge. She manages to pluck their names here and there. The small woman is Luda, and perhaps a relation of Zhenya. The other women is Galya. The three men who arrived are Borya, Ivan, and Ilya. They all know each other well, too well for patronymics. 

Eventually Luda announces to everyone that, her brother- Maria was right- needs to rest and that they can come back tomorrow if they wish.

Galya leaves last and Maria turns away as they say goodbye. For the first time in all her ghostly spying, she feels like an interloper.

But this man did something to offend the government, so perhaps he would not mind hosting a Grand Duchess. 

She goes back the next day, and then the next. Slowly she begins to fill out the history of these people, through their words, and what she observes. Zhenya is a poet who drew the attention of the government for penning a mocking version of The International that was circulated in several underground publications. He was briefly arrested, but was released after a few weeks with only a warning not to continue spreading his writings- and a beating. He lives with his sister, Luda, who takes in sewing to supplement the money made by the sale of his poems. To Maria he seemed rather weak at first and she understood why the Soviets would not waste resources keeping him in jail. Only when he speaks against the government does his back straighten and his eyes burn with intensity, and Maria understood why he was given a beating. 

Galya is an actress who performs at a cheap theater in the city. She is very glamourous, but it seems to Maria that this is affected, and that she is just playing a part, that of a richer, more famous performer. Her apartment is furnished very sparsely. She owns a rich fur coat, and often wears it to sleep, for extra warmth. She is indeed engaged to Zhenya but they have not married yet. It is on Galya’s orders that printed versions of Zhenya’s International are posted around around the city, including several on the fronts’ government buildings and pushed under their doors. It is because of her that newspapers, paid with large amounts of her acting money, continue to publish Zhenya’s poems. 

The three men, Borya, Ivan, and Ilya, are students and live together near the university. They remind Maria of her father’s officers, the young men of army that she grew up with. They are close friends and are loud, opinionated, sometimes intelligent, sometimes drunk. They are not as idealistic about opposing the government as Zhenya, nor as driven to action as Galya, and Maria suspects that they go along with the plans of these two because they are all friends more than for their own love of freedom. The same goes for Luda, she loves her brother and wants to support him, but she herself is one of those people that can survive under any government, not because she is resilient, so much as because she is good at keeping her head down. 

They are not even properly rebels, so much as a group of friends with unpopular opinions who distribute writings. Maria wonders if they know about the deaths of her family. Even if these opposing newspaper did write about this, it has been more than a month since their graves were found and this is old news now. Life moves so fast and people are so willing to forget past cruelties. Even living in the House of Special Purpose Maria barely thought about the War, although previously it had occupied so much of her thoughts.   
She likes her six new subjects, but she is disappointed in them. She knows that their petty actions will never amount to anything, and that they will disappear under the wheels of the new government. While they may be bold in Luda’s sitting room, (or salon as Galya calls it, although Maria has been to salons and she knows that a group of six less than rich young people in a poor drawing room does not constitute one,) they are not ones to riot in the streets outside the residences of those in power as a crowd did not so long ago outside her own home. 

The crowd outside the Winter Palace was twelve years ago, and yet Maria feels that more time has passed since she died in July of this year than the decade separating her from this incident. It is late October now, according to the daily newspaper. After the French Revolution even the names of the months were changed, but here the government deigns to let the people keep their Octyabr. 

She likes to watch their lives. I am the vampire mentioned in The International. I am the royal parasite. But I do not take anything, I only observe, trying to live through them. But she does not want to watch them forever; she must move on. It frustrates her not to see these people have neat arcs for their lives. She wants to see them change something, anything happening around them, and she knows that they will not. 

A month later Maria sees an agent of change that she does not want to watch. She is nearly home, standing by high back gate of the palace, when she sees him. Yakov Yurovsky. Yakov Yurovsky! Her mind shrieks. Maria’s heart no longer beats, yet she feels the same terrified feeling that she had immediately after he finished his death sentence in the Ipatiev basement. Her hands grips the iron of the fence; she is frozen in place as he walks past her on the other side of the street. For the first time since her death she forgets that she is invisible. Yurovsky, she never gave him the honor of using his two names, looks much the same as the last time she saw him. He wears a neat uniform, carries himself with measured walk, and his beard curls across the lower part of his face like coarse pubic hair. 

Maria has never in her life felt the pure hatred that she feels now. It leaves her weak, and she cannot move as the man who killed her family walks past. How dare he, how dare he continue on living with what he has done. How could he continue to exist, so unchanged, so unscared when he is responsible for ending the lives of Nicholas, Alexandra, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, Alexei, Eugene, Anna, Alexei, and Ivan?

Maria cannot speak or she would curse him, she would spit on his shined shoes. But her shock and loathing renders her so immobile that she is powerless- still!- to cause this man even a fraction of the pain that he cause for her. She rubs her thigh at the place where she knows exists a clean bullet hole, fired on his orders.   
Maria stands at the gate for a long time. In life, whenever things became unbearable as Maria, she would think outside of herself, as if her life were a story being told to someone else, perhaps one being read to the family of another Tsar in a neat study. She does that now. 

Their bodies were laid to rest, but their souls were not, and the girls remained between death and life. Maria often went out, watching her people as they lived out their lives. One day she saw the evil man who had lead their execution. He passed by her but Maria, marking that he was still alive- 

But Maria what? She will not follow him, watching impartial, invisibly. In life she was good, so much that her father once remarked, after a small transgression of hers, "I was always afraid of the wings growing. I am glad to see she is only a human child." He need not fear. The thoughts that race through Maria’s head certainly mark her as human. Perhaps now he should fear her growing horns instead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> These are real lyrics from L’Internationale, an originally French song, popular at the time with the socialists.   
> Tsarskoe Selo was another of the family’s residences.   
> In Russia, a patrynomic is your father’s name+ an ending. If you respect someone you would call them by their first name, such as, “Ivan Ivanovich.” These characters are all friends, so they are not using them.   
> Oktyabr- October.   
> Maria is not being petty when she describes Yurovsky’s beard as looking like pubic hair. Google Yakov Yurovsky and you will see. It’s horrifying.


	10. Chapter 10

Anastasia means, ‘of the resurrection,’ ‘the prison opener,’ or ‘the breaker of chains.’ The youngest Grand Duchess loved her name. Every time in church when the priest read the words of Jesus, “I am the Resurrection and the life,” she would feel pleased. “I am the resurrection, she would think.

The resurrection.

Perhaps this was why she took so long to kill. She had woken, lying on the floor in the basement, feeling the daze of awakening for sleep but multiplied by a thousand. Hands grasped her ankles roughly, dragging her across the floor. Her body slid easily, moving over the blood pooling on the wooden floor boards. Anastasia had sat up then, wondering what the sticky liquid in her eyes was. Points of her body were shot with pain, and these seemed to radiate outwards in waves of agony. She screamed, an inhuman sound of hurt and anger, and the soldier holding her legs had dropped them and jumped backwards before grabbing for his gun and making her silent again. There had been blood in her mouth too, and she had seen tiny flecks of crimson spray towards him. Anastasia was rather proud of her last action, that she did not die cowering on the ground. If he had not been so quick with his gun, she would have cursed at him too. She had screamed because she was in more pain than her mind could comprehend, but Anastasia hoped that she had frightened the soldier, that he would never forget when a corpse rose and wailed at him. 

When she woke a second time, in a drawing room of the Winter Palace, she initially thought the same thing had happened once more, that she was still not dead, and Anastasia sat up once more, prepared to scream again, but Tatiana had appeared and hissed at her to be quiet so no one would discover them. Tatiana telling her to be quiet or else face consequences was nothing new, and Anastasia had complied, although what they had discovered soon after allowed her to scream as much as she liked. This was good. If Anastasia does not scream she feels that she would explode, that her soul would burst out of her body, leaving the shell of herself irreparably broken on the floor. 

She goes far enough away from her sisters- easy enough in this palace- that she can push endless streams of air through her vocal cords, releasing her wild sounds to the deaf ears of those passing by on the streets, only stopping when she no longer wishes to, and not constrained by a raw throat or dizziness resulting from lack of oxygen. I am the resurrection. 

‘The prison opener,’ yes, she was that too. When she was born, the last disappointing female birth, her father had pardoned groups of students who had been jailed for rioting again him the previous winter. Perhaps he should not have. These students would graduate and go on to ruin the country. Ironic, that they were only free to overthrow the Tsar because he had granted them this freedom years before. 

But as for being ‘the breaker of chains,’ Anastasia is not so sure about. She does not know how to break the chain that shackles them all to this world. 

She is climbing a tree now, one in a far corner of the palace grounds. It is old and rotted with no more grounds staff to take care it it. Its limbs creak beneath her weight as she pulls herself up and further into its branches. Perhaps it will break and she will fall, but Anastasia will not mind. She has always wondered what it would be like to fall without fear of pain at the end, but even now she is not quiet brave enough to jump. Her body does not feel pain anymore, not from anything, although she has tried on one occasion to feel it again. She used a sewing needle and flicked it across her palm softly at first, and then harder, marking curving lines up and down her arm as she wielded the needle like a conductor’s baton, swiping down and then pushing the momentum upwards, to the tune of her own symphony. But while she saw the skin crease underneath its tip, she felt none of the needle’s sting and saw no blood. She would have to stick with screaming. 

Strange that Alexei is not here with them, he who would benefit the most from a bloodless existence. Now he could jump off whatever he liked, his bruises would not swell with blood that refused to clot properly, and he would have no need for his wheelchair. Alexei. The last letter in the longer acronym of all the siblings. OTMAA. He would have climbed this tree with her. 

The grounds are bare now. It is fall and everything is dying, so there are no more leaves to hide her from view. Grand Duchesses are not supposed to climb trees, but now Anastasia is invisible and can hike her skirts up as high as she wants. This freedom is less thrilling than she expected. So much of the reason why she acted out in life- to the point of being called nasty and even evil- was for the reactions she would receive. Now there are no horrified governesses to run up to the base of this tree and shout at Anastasia from her perch to get down this minute, that she is too old to be doing such things, she is seventeen now, a grown woman with her skirts down and hair up and she simply cannot behave like this. Anastasia will reply that she refuses to get down, and the governess will be forced to get a ladder and a male servant to climb up and fetch her back to the ground. 

No one comes. Even the four of their most loyal servants, Eugene, Anna, Ivan, and Alexei- she does not want to forget their names and holds them in her mind always, like a prayer- have not been left here with them. 

She wishes that more of their household had been left with them in this second life. If she could not have her family, she wants other members of the royal household here. She misses her tutor, Pierre Gilliard. He had not even been allowed to come with them to Ipatiev. Of course if he had, then he would have been shot too, and she is not wishing for his death...

She did not like school, and was behind on her lessons, even as she tried to learn them in exile. It was hard to concentrate when every moment there was the constant question: what will happen to us? Death was constantly in the back of her mind but she became used to the constant fear, so much so that when they actually were killed Anastasia had become so used to the idea that they were not going to be killed that she was surprised and did nothing until the shooting began. 

Pierre Gilliard would scold her for screaming, as he scolded her for being distracted in her studies, but she would not be too cross with him.

She has made no effort to grow her knowledge in the months they have been her. No matter how long she lives, Anastasia will only know the level of English, of geography, of mathematics that she knew when she died. There is no point to learning anything new, now gaining information from books is even more pointless than it was in the House of Special Purpose. This fact is a bit sad, but not so sad that she wants to read all the time, like Olga. 

The light is fading, and she contemplates sitting in this tree all night, remaining here- not sleeping of course- like a wild forest spirit until the dawn. Her hair is down and blows about her face. She does not bother pinning it up each day. It does not matter; no one will be able to see this mark of her adulthood. Her skirts are rolled up at the top too nowadays. There is no one to be scandalized by her lower legs now. She could be naked if she wished, like a proper forest spirit, but even Anastasia does not want to go that far. 

She sees a figure walking across the grounds, back towards the palace. It is either Maria coming back from wherever she goes, or Tatiana returning from the Soviet offices. 

It is Maria, she sees as the figure approaches. Together they are the little pair, although for the past months it has been more like Olga and Anastasia together somewhere is the place, and Tatiana and Maria outside. She does not know what to call those pairs. Old-young, and middle, maybe. 

Maria is walking hurriedly and her hair, which she continues to put up every day, is falling down as is she has been running. She carries herself as if her body is stiff and lead, and she must use great effort in order to push it forward. 

“Get down and guess who I just saw,” she demands, craning her neck to look up at Anastasia. 

“Baba Yaga,” replies Anastasia, making no move to get down. When they first became ghosts she wondered if maybe other things thought to be imaginary were real too. But so far she has not seen Firebirds, or Vasilisa Mikulishna, or Baba Yaga, the old women with her house on chicken legs, of anything else fantastical. It is most disappointing.

“Yakov Yurovsky,” Maria snaps back. Now Anastasia is listening, and she climbs down to a lower branch and lets herself jump down. She hits the ground, too hard for a living girl but fine for a ghost, dusts herself off, and says to her sister, “What, where?”

“Just now, walking past on the street.”

In Ipatiev Anastasia stuck her tongue out at Yurovsky behind his back. She remembers the thrill of her tiny slight. She is very proud of that moment, almost as much as her screaming at the soldier that followed later. “Well, did you follow him?”

“No, I did not want to look at him.”

“Maybe Tatiana knows something, if he is here on official business.”

Anastasia shrugs. “If he is here, we should kill him.” She does not exact means this, but she does not not mean it either. It is a remark, to shock and amuse Maria, who is clearly shaken from her sighting.

“Yes,” agrees Maria in the same calm tone that she has said everything else.

They walk back inside. I am the resurrection, Anastasia thinks again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Historical Notes:
> 
> Both Maria and Anastasia regained consciousness during the assassination. 
> 
> The firebird, Vasilisa Mikulishna, and Baba Yaga are Russian fairy tale characters. 
> 
> Pierre Gilliard was one of the girls’ tutors.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ONE MORE CHAPTER! I swear here and now that it will be at least 3,000 words. ALSO: I will be publishing a slightly updated version of this story on Amazon as an ebook. A bonus chapter told from Alexei's POV will be included. Please consider supporting this. I will also have the Alexei chapter up on for a fee on one dollar. Will let you guys know when both are available.

The Grand Duchesses are throwing a fancy ball. Of course it will not be the grandest affair that the WInter Palace has ever seen, what with the grounds uncared for, and the snow that had begun to fall sitting unshoveled in piles all over the paths, and some of it inside having blow in through open windows. There will be no food, but none of the guests will need any. The attendance will be very light, only four girls, but what guests they will be, daughters of a murdered Tsar, Grand Duchesses back from the dead. There will be no musicians to play for them, but the four guests will not mind. It is November, their family is gone, their dynasty is gone, and they will take any entertainment that they can get.

This was Anastasia's idea. The sisters have done things like this past, performances for their parents, even in the Ipatiev house. Anastasia loved to put on fancy dress, the ability to be someone else that only a scarf, or top hat gave her. Especially in the Ipatiev house.

Maria is in on her plan, but it is to be a surprise for the big pair. Many of their clothes that were left in the palace were breaking down, being eaten by moths or mold, not having been properly packed, but they have found enough to wear, and it is just for one night. Because Olga and Tatiana will need proper partners, Anastasia and Maria have decided to dress as officers. They improvise, using ink for mustaches, and donning men's shirts, knotting them again and again until they fit, or at least stay on. There is none of the old officers' finery left here, no swords, or epaulets, sashes or spurs, but Anastasia finds a fire poker with some gilt on the handle. This can serve as her sword. For their faces, they use ink, darkening their eyebrows and drawing facial hair. Anastasia's mustache goes a bit crooked, but the ink proves difficult to wipe off, and she rather likes it, since it gives her a devilish air, like a villain in a puppet show.

They find two old dresses for Olga and Tatiana, and drape these over their arms as they go to work on the next task: a ball room. The palace has a myriad of locations in which to hold a formal ball, but Maria picks a smaller room that the girls have not been in at all in the past five months. Anastasia agrees with her decision. This is a good choice; the room has an air of new ness. While Anastasia had lived here for so much of her life, apparently it is possible to forget bits of a home. There is not much the girls can do about the dust on the chandelier, or on the floor, but they do make rounds to the neighboring rooms, looking for as many candles as possible. The chapel proves useful. Anastasia followed by a less enthusiastic Maria darts behind the screen onto the altar- the forbidden altar- and they reemerge, their arms full of candles in various states of melting. _It is not a holy place, not any more. Churches that are sold or given to other purposes cease to be holy ground, everyone knows that,_ Anastasia tells herself. All she feels as they leave the chapel, which still smells faintly of incense, of lost prayers ascending to the high ceiling, is a small thrill at her daring. She has always wanted to stand on an altar.

The last living time she attended a service was not pleasant. They were given one in Ipatiev house, before they were killed. This should have been an obvious tip off, why grant the family what they had been asking for unless their happiness no longer mattered? But Anastasia had not thought of that. She had been so eenured to the possibility of death. But there, with the comforting prayers mixing with the guards and the prison of the House of Special Purpose, something had broken with in her. She had known then, something, she had felt overwhelming sorrow pressing down on her like a boulder, such as she had never felt previously. Anastasia had lain awake for a very long time that night. But the next morning, the family got up, and everything was as normal. Her mind refused to let her give in to drowning grief Of course then they were all shot, so perhaps despair would have been a correct response on her last day.

Even now Anastasia dead does not feel that brokenness in her spirit, but she still does not want to tarry long in their old church.

They plant the candles around the edge of what will serve as their dance floor, on the fireplace mantle, in candelabras. The host of flames twist, flaring then falling, bending around their wicks. This room is buried inside the palace, and there are no windows for the light to shine out of. So many candles, but they do not do much to heat the room. Their heat rises in small waves and then dissipates into the cold air. It is November now, and snows often. The cold is interesting for Anastasia. Her body seems aware of it; she can feel that the temperature is lower, but it does not chill her, creeping into her bones and freezing them as it did in previous winters. She has thrown snowballs at statues on the grounds and when she shapes and packs the ice in her palms it does not burn with the icy pain that was her bane during previous snowball fights. The statutes did not return her volley. Next, Anastasia will try throwing snow at the living on the streets outside.

Maria has gone off to convince Olga and Tatiana to come, and give them their costumes. The big pair will resist at first, as always, but Maria will win them over and they will have a grand game, as always.

Bored with standing, Anastasia sits on the floor, in the center of the circle of candles. In the shifting light she can pretend that the ballroom is filled with richly dressed people, aiming to win favor with those in higher positions, to find themselves or their children a good match, to put their finery on display, to dance, to forget those that march in the streets outside, their mouths filled with violence and their banners filled with revolution. This world is gone forever, no matter how many letters Tatiana sends, but for one night she can pretend- to be a man, to be alive, to be older.

The door is thrown open and flung shut again just as quickly. Maria rushes in and stands next to Anastasia who scrambles up. Outside she hears the other two.

"Come in!" Shouts Anastasia in an affectedly deep voice while straightening her baggy shirt. She grabs her fire poker- sword and holds it at her side, not bothered by the weight.

Olga and Tatiana enter, dressed in lilac and mint green. These are summer day dresses, never meant to be worn to a ball in November, and they are old and faded, ill fitting and moth eaten, but in the candlelight they are as fine as any court dress Anastasia ever wore.

Maria has found silk flowers somewhere too and pinned them in each girl's hair. The colors do not match the dresses. This is alright. As soon as the door closes behind them, Anastasia brandishes her poker and announces, "I am Dmitri Chakh-Bakov."

She and Maria did not plan out who they were going to be exactly, only male dance partners in general, but being Olga's old love is better, nevermind that Dmitri would never have been invited to one of these balls.

"And I am Vladimir Kiknadze!" Says Maria, catching on. This was the name of Tatiana's soldier. The big pair, taking in the candles and the costumes and names, shriek at them both, but they see that this is to be a game and play along. Even Olga must be bored with reading after five months, and though the four girls are really four women, old enough to marry, old enough to die from the revolution, they are also four lonely girls undead for reasons they cannot understand, and tonight they will dance.

"Volodia! How wonderful to see you again!" Tatiana exclaims, drawing herself up to her full height, every inch the Grand Duchess that she was.

"Dance with me?" asks Maria in a deepened voice, and she and Tatiana pair off, their hands clasped together and Maria holding Tatiana's waist and she holding Maria's shoulder. Olga needs more prompting, so Anastasia places her poker down on the side of the room. She begins humming a simple waltz and steps forward to meet her eldest sister. They dance. The steps are remembered by their muscles, honed by practice, with instructors and with proper partners. Anastasia has not danced in so long, but her body easily executes the steps, back, forward, her feet pointed, her back straight. She dances the man's part, leading not following, twirling Olga, not herself.

Anastasia dances with Tatiana, with Maria, then with all of her sisters together, as they hold hands move together and apart, their circle shrinking and growing faster and faster.

They sing too, not just the instrumental pieces that accompany formal dancing, but any song in any language they can remember. Maria sings a song called The International about workers, but its lyrics are changed to be quite rude, and Anastasia finds it hilarious.

When they are tired of dancing and almost all of the flowers have fallen out of the older two's hair, the four girls find themselves sprawled on the floor, their heads close together, their feet stretched away, like the four points on a compass. The sisters are talking of everything and nothing, and the conversation stretches on ebbing and flowing. The candles are dripping wax on the floor but it does not matter. They will never use this room again. Unlike in their other games, no one will make them clean up the detritus of their make believe.

"I saw Yurovsky yesterday," says Maria.

" _Yakov?_ " asks someone else, Anastasia's eyes are on the high ceiling and she cannot see who.

"The same." As if it would be anyone else.

"I've seen him too." This from Tatiana, she thinks.

"Where?"

"He comes into that government building where I go. Everyday for the past week." Definitely Tataiana.

"Any you did not tell us?" Maria.

"Shhh, you saw him yesterday and did not mentioned it til now."

"He is doing some work here, with the Petersburg branch. I do not know."

"Maria was thinking," Anastasia begins, wondering how the others will take this.

"That we should kill him," Maria finishes calmly. There is silence after this, but not a shocked one. The conversation continues on in the same lazy fashion it had before.

"I thought the same- when I first saw him."

"And Anastasia, do you agree?" Says Olga. Her older sister does not need convincing. None of them do. To kill Yakov Yurovsky has occurred to all of them at some time or another.

"Yes." Anastasia has never even injured anything, not even an animal, badly, let alone killed. She would like to try with him.

"All in favor?" Olga is their leader. Businesslike and organized as usual.

"Aye." Maria answers first.

"Aye." Anastasia hears her voice.

"Aye." Tatiana.

"And I." Olga.

They are in perfect agreement, but they can wait until tomorrow to begin. The four girls stay like that, on the floor, their hair mingling, talking of murder and their past, until the sun rises.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The family was given a service before their execution the next day.  
> Vladimir Kiknadeze was a real soldier Tatiana was in love with.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would like to thank everyone who read this fic, and my beta, ElizabethAnnSoph. Stay tuned for a bonus chapter and some Q and A stuff.

The preparation for the killing of Yakov Mikhailovich Yurovsky was carried out by four young women inexperienced in the ways of murder, and done so in a casual yet efficient way.  _ We could teach the Soviets a thing or two about successful assassinations,  _ Anastasia thinks. Of course they have not done it yet, but she has every confidence that this will go smoothly. They could file a report about it:  _ An Examination of the Methods of Grand Duchesses and Their Use of Deadly Force.  _

 There is an air of urgency, as they do not know how long Yurovsky is staying in Petersburg, and no one wants to play cat and mouse, chasing him across all of Russia. As soon as the sky lightens outside- later as it is November now-  Maria and Tatiana go out, Tatiana to check that Yurovsky is still in the city, and Maria to secure their weapons. The girls agreed on guns, if possible. They will be the quicker and less messy than stabbing. 

  Anastasia passes the time waiting for them to return by throwing snowballs at passerby on the street. But, being out of practice, her aim is not as good as it once was. Clearing the fence is hard, and when she finally does manage to knock a man’s fur hat off, he blames it on a small vagrant boy loitering nearby and shouts at him. Anastasia regrets throwing it and goes back inside, tracking bits of ice across the floors. 

  “I found guns,” says Maria returning, in the same way that a women coming home from her shopping might announce to her family, “I found fresh fruit.” She holds the front of her skirt up, forming a basket of small firearms. Kneeling down, she pushes them off her skirt and onto the floor. “All loaded.” 

  Maria ‘found’ these guns in a group of students, or poets or something, and she rattles off their names, saying that using their guns for this purpose will finally let the students be able to make the difference that they wanted to. “Galya will be thrilled, maybe I should write a letter to her about it?” Maria wonders aloud. “And Zhenya could write a poem, or another song.”

  Anastasia has no idea who these people are, but she is glad for the arms, four small pistols. She wonders if they have been used to kill people before. 

 Tatiana arrives too, saying that she saw  _ him _ walking towards the same building from which they stole their file.  _ Not such a secret police if a high up member can be tracked so easily.  _ Unlike their bodies, there is not no need for any traveling or tracking this time. They need only walk down a few streets. There is no rush. It is only just morning, and early. 

  No target practice is required. All four girls have at least a rough idea of how to shoot. Olga even briefly carried a small pistol in the House of Special Purpose. A shame that she never got to use it, and eventually surrendered it under threat of worst consequences should it be found. 

  Anastasia turns the one she has selected over in her hands. It has a weight to it, more than  of serious consthe metal that makes up its components. This little chunk of steel can shatter the course of history. She is going to kill someone. A tiny frisson of anticipation runs through her. Of course she is only excited because it is one Yakov Mikhailovich Yurovsky. She would never be happy to end another innocent’s life. She would not kill the man in the street in the fur hat for example. Unless he was a Soviet. Maybe then…She will see how one killing goes. 

  “Did you try firing it?” Olga walks up behind her, gesturing to Anastasia’s gun. Olga sticks out her leg to show that she has already put hers in her boot, the same as she did in Ipatiev house. “I did not try mine.” 

  “No…” Should she? It will be so loud, and there will be no need for quickness in Yurovsky’s office. If something malfunctions, she can just try again and again. Aim will not be a problem. The cold barrel can be placed only a centimeter from his head and he will not notice anything. At first. “But they look well cared for, I think?” Anastasia is not an expert on gun maintenance. 

  “Why are we doing this anyway?” Olga is not talking about the same thing any more.

  “Revenge- but you know I was thinking, this maybe what gets us home.” Of course, they are home, home in the Winter Palace, but home is not here, home is wherever their family can be all together, the clunky, seldom used acronym: NAOTMAA. 

Anastasia continues, “because our bodies, I do not think they mattered as much. Who cares, we were already buried- sort of. But Yurovsky! That horrible man! It is because of him that we are all dead, and I thought if he dies too that we-”

  “But we already tried, so many things-”   
  “Yes, Olga, I know, but this, this is a  _ killing _ . This is going to change everything.”

    “You think so?” Olga says dismissively. Tatiana is the one with the political schemes, not her. “I do not care. I want him dead either way.”

   A new thought strikes Anastasia. “What if he comes back, like us?”

  “He had better not.” While their ghostly condition is certainly not ideal, the idea of Yurovsky being granted the same second life provokes indignation. Anastasia is not sure if she believes in Heaven anymore, but she will gladly hold onto her belief in Hell if only so that Yurovsky can be consigned there forever. 

  The thought that Yurovsky would be killed and be able to see them, to  _ talk  _ with them is one that she flatly refuses to considers. To be trapped with  _ that horrible man _ for all eternity in a fold of reality that no one else could see is beyond what Anastasia will accept. “That will not happen. He has no reason to. He is being killed justly. We were not.” If Yurovsky should remain with them, she will have to find some way of killing herself. 

  The palace door shuts behind them with more force than usual, as if the palace is a living being and the door its its mouth, expelling the girls, its offspring which it has nurtured these past five months, housed them through sorrow and pain. They are finally grown now, ready to kill.  But for the colder temperature, Anastasia remembers their first outing together as ghosts, the fear with which they clung to each other, each praying this was a dream, knowing that it was not. They pass the cathedral. No time for praying today. There is other blood to spill. It is not holy but maybe they will be saved by it.

  What would her mother say, seeing Anastasia now walking to kill a man. What would her mother say about this entire twisted adventure, sending them to boarded up palaces and back to Siberia, along dark country roads that lead to forest clearings drenched in blood, to laboratories where their own tattered bodies were examined, to the offices of secret police, always searching for three other ghosts, never finding.  _ Mama, I miss you so much.  _ And her father, would he approve of their last, desperate method, of their revenge, he a royal who was constantly in danger of assassination? _ Your imp will be a murderess soon.  _ And Alexei, constantly protected from danger so that he could carry on their bloodline in his own weak veins,  _ Alexei would you have come with us to kill Yurovsky?  _

  Tatiana leads the other three into the building, with the practiced walk of one who has entered a place hundred of times, and the other follow, less certainly. The building is empty- _ what day is it? Is Sunday still considered a day of rest?  _

  “I have no idea what the date is,” says Tatiana when asked, “but I definitely saw him walking down this very street, look his office is just through here.” Her voice chokes off as they ascend the last stair and see that the door to said office is open, and occupied. 

  Everyone freezes, staring down the hall at  _ that horrible man.  _ Living Anastasia had hated Yurovsky, because he was another soldier, strict and harsh, and when dead Anastasia thought of him, she was filled with the same impotent rage she felt in life when faced with situations that she deemed unfair, flaring hot then leaving her weak and tired of feeling all together. Watching Yurovsky sit at his desk, working so calmly, so unaware of the four undead Grand Duchesses in the building with him, Anastasia finds herself filled with an emotion so powerfully calm, that she feels that that she could stand here forever, preserved by the sheer deadly cold of her loathing. She will kill him, without gloating or speeches, she will kill him without torture or dramatic, she will end his life, not so much with pleasure, but out of necessity, but because she needs him dead just as he needs to breathe to stay alive. To kill Yurovsky is as instinctual to her as the habits of an animal, written into her mind and on her heart. 

  “He has a wife and children- he has a family,” says Tatiana, to her sisters. Not one of them has moved towards him, and Anastasia knows that they must feel the same dead hatred that she does. “I have heard him mention them to one of the other men here, and I wonder how he could even look at them after- what he did to us.” 

  Olga walks forward first, then Anastasia following. These two have not seen him since that night in the basement, and both are filled with the same horrible curiosity that a young child feels at a funeral that compels him to peer into the open casket. They must have a look at this man, their jailer, their executioner, their victim. His office is neat, and he is reading and annotating some printed report. His desk is in perfect order, and he works steadily with the air of a man who is perfectly at ease with the world and with himself.

  It would be better he appeared lazy and scheming, if his office was disorganized, and he was late to work. But he is not. And this makes Anastasia angry, that this man has a wife and children, children that love him as she loved her own father. It makes her angry that Yurovsky can sit before them and appear as a regular man, not as a devil with blood on his hands. She is furious that he can still have qualities of a decent person, and more furious still that people all over the world can be normal and so evil at the same time. Life should be clear cut, with the villains completely bad and those that fight them completely good. But is she, Anastasia completely good, preparing to commit cold blooded murder?  _ I am better than he is, at least.  _

 Perhaps he came into the office today, on a holiday or Sunday, because it is his last day in the city and he wants to finish his tasks so he can leave on the morrow. Soon, Anastasia thinks, he will go home to wherever he is living, home from his sojourn into another city, and he will step off the train and go to his family, and perhaps his children will run out of his house and greet him, maybe there will be a dog too, if this man is the type to be kind to animals, and his wife will come out, and say how was your journey, we missed you, and they will all go inside their house as it is winter and it is cold, maybe he has even brought back presents, and they will all want to hear what he did there and who he saw. They will eat together, a fancier meal than usual, prepared by the servants- surely they have some servants- because Papa has come home. Later after the children have gone to bed, his wife will ask more serious questions about the state things, how is the new government, and maybe he will answer honestly because in the new social order everyone is equal and women can here about politics now too, or maybe he will not because these things are classified, or he does not want to worry her. He will not tell her, just like he did not tell her when he shot a family in a dark basement, like he did not tell her how he stabbed, burned, and disfigured eleven corpses before burying them in the woods. And he will go to bed, and sleep through the night, not troubled by ghosts or past his sins. 

  Except that none of these things will ever happen because there are four ghosts here to trouble him, and to make sure that even if they can never go sleep again, neither will he.

_   Click, click, click, click _ , sound four triggers as they are called to order, like her father’s troops. The other three girls remain in front of him, standing across from his desk, but Anastasia walks around behind him, aiming at the back of his head. She will kill him without a thought, without wanting to see the light leave his eyes. She will fire her gun as easily as one of their palace cooks would ring the neck of a chicken, because it is necessary, because it is a task that must be done. 

  Her hands holding the gun are shaking, making it hard to aim properly, and she thinks that she is a bad assassin if she cannot even hold still, and she thinks that the soldiers in the basement had better training and an advantage too, because they had a leader and Yurovsky to make a little speech beforehand, and after he finished they knew when to fire, and Yurovsky was the one giving orders in the aftermath, and the other soldiers needed only to think about following them, but the girls do not have a leader or any sayings worked out. She has no idea how long they have been standing here, and she feels that time is running out, that Yurovsky may get up at any moment. Her eyes meet Maria’s across the desk, Maria the kindest, sweetest on of them all, and her face is such a picture of anger, that is shocks Anastasia, and she wonders what she herself, the worst behaved one of them all, looks like now, if Maria looks like this. She has not seen a mirror in a very long time. 

  “Well?” Says Anastasia, not wanting to be the one to fire the first shot, but not wanting to be late with it either. The moments stretch on as she makes a slight gesture with her gun towards the man. 

  “All right,” Olga appears as one ready to go forward into the breech, absolutely terrified and absolutely determined. “On my count, one, two-”

  The world in this one room explodes as four initial bits of metal are discharged from metal cases into flesh, bone. Anastasia could not say who fired first, she only knows that suddenly everything was smoke, and her gun discharging again and again, until all its bullets- she does not know how many, but Maria was right, it was well loaded- are gone, and her finger pulling the trigger is useless. 

  The guns are empty and the man’s body in front of them is now full of their cargo. The smoke dissipating in the air does not irritate Anastasia’s dead lungs or eyes, and she looks clearly at the torn body before them. Yakov Mikhailovich Yurovsky, he is dead and she will give him a patronymic at last, is dead, solidly dead, no further need for the butts of rifles, or the thrusts of bayonets. 

  He, or rather it,  _ the corpse,  _ has been shot in the back of his head, by Anastasia, as well as the front, and in the front of his chest as evidenced by the crimson spots she sees seeping from the back of his uniform. Probably the shots were aimed at his heart, but the bullets strayed across his chest, creating a constellation of scarlet. There is not much blood from these wounds, but from his head wounds, blood is running down his neck, staining his collar, and his face, obscuring all features in a tide of bright red. There is so very much blood in the head of a person; Anastasia wonders how it all fits in the skull with the brain. She is consious of a smell, such as she has never experienced before, and though it does not make her physically sick, the sight of the life of another human removed from his insides and pouring outside is dizzying. Anastasia wants to faint and cannot. Her new body is stubborn, not allowing her even a moment of nothing that unconsciousness brings. Her head is held in place and her eyes open, forcing her to look. 

  The body is not moving save for the bleeding wounds. His eyes are open, and his face is blank, empty. 

  His head continues to bleed, but this is normal, Olga says. “In the hospital I hated helping with the head wounds, because they were so messy.”

   “His heart is still beating, and pumping blood around,”  says Tatiana, “but it will stop.” This is fascinating. A heart can beat in a body that is dead, and not beat in theirs.

  Her rage is gone, pulled from her like a rotten tooth, leaving only a gaping hole in its place.  _ What now, what shall we do, we have killed a man.   _ She has a sensation of numbness, of floating outside of her body and observing the scene from outside the room. At least the blood did not splatter everywhere. The floor is still clean, but his desk and papers are not. Whatever report he was working on so diligently is ruined, and more copies will have to be made. 

   “Leave him as he is, to be found, but take the guns. If we leave them, it will look like a suicide,” Says someone’s voice, far away it seems. This is not quite true, no person could shoot themselves so many times from so many angles. Anastasia is still holding her gun and so she does nothing. 

  “Wait.” Tatiana reaches out and pulls a paper towards her. It is mostly clean, with only a little blood having gotten onto its corner. She looks around for a pen, and finds one, unstained in its holder at the far end of the desk. Taking hold of it, she presses it hard into the middle of the paper and prints four large letters: OTMA. Anastasia understand what she is doing, Tatiana, always the clever writer, communicating with the living. When Yurovsky is found, these four letters will be seen in front of him. Stark against the white paper and contrasting with the red around them. OTMA. Anastasia hopes it baffles those who see it, this is not a word, and she hopes that someone says, oh OTMA, remember it is what those Romanov girls called themselves. Strange that Yurovsky should write it. But look, it is not in his hand writing, another man will say. 

  And this death will have be be hushed up, even his wife will have to be told that he died of a heart failure, and his body will be hastily cremated here in the city and only the ashes sent back to her. His desk will be cleaned, and if it cannot be cleaned then it will be burned, but you cannot burn what others saw, and the resulting rumors, and it will be whispered about for years, OTMA, OTMA. And though the new government does not believe in ghosts, some will wonder, shot as he was in so many places, with no weapon found, and a stranger’s handwriting on paper before him…

  OTMA will not be forgotten.

  But what about the girls behind those four letter, are they meant to stay here in this world? 

“We can go home,” says Olga suddenly, and Anastasia does not know what she means, for they were already leaving, turning away from the messy death behind them, back to the palace, each to be alone with her own thoughts. “We can go home now!” And Anastasia turns to ask her what on earth she is talking about when- 

  Anastasia’s vision goes dark at the edges, and she thinks that she is going to faint, finally. Her ears too, are acting strangely, as all sounds seems to disappear from her hearing. There is rushing, like water and it echoes strangely, as if she has fallen down a well.

  Anastasia sees them last. It makes sense, poetically, she was the last girl child born, the last disappointing pregnancy, the last time the canons would sound too few times. She was the last girl to meet her parents and sisters, the last to come of age, and lengthen her skirts and twist up her hair. It makes sense that she would be the last to see them. Her family.

   With the same immediacy that she started awake, lying on a cold dusty floor five months ago, her surroundings are gone, and she hears, from a very great distance away, voices. She knows every one of her sister’s voices, but they are standing beside her, and anyway, these do not belong to them, but she has known these two since birth, and her hand goes limp, dropping her gun, and suddenly it is worth it that she has killed a man, because now she can see three figures, two taller, and one smaller but walking too, and not in a wheelchair.

   Something breaks inside of her and she shrieks, “Mama! Papa! Alexei!” Just as she yelled their names as they searched through the long night of their rebirth, with the same force that she screamed at the soldier dragging her body across a basement in Siberia. They are getting closer, or she is moving towards them, and where ever she is, if it is eternal limbo or even Hell, nothing matters anymore, not Red or White, titles or governments, or ever turning revolutions, Anastasia is crying now, she is able to cry now, and she so happy that her chest feels like it is splitting apart. They are closer than close now, and then Anastasia is with her whole family again, finally at peace.

 

_ “Everyone who comes into the house inspects our rooms . . . It's difficult to write about anything cheerful, because there's all too little cheerfulness here. On the other hand, God doesn't abandon us. The sun shines, the birds sing, and this morning we heard the bells sounding matins . . .”  _ Maria Nikolaevna Romanova in her diary, written in exile. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Historical Notes:  
> The Tsar gave Olga a small pistol to carry, but she eventually gave it up.


	13. Chapter 13

**ANNOUNCEMENT!**

A more polished, edited, slightly updated version of this story is a available as an eBook on Amazon. It is $2.99 (The lowest Amazon lets you sell books for.) Should you purchase it you will have: This story in eBook format to read whenever AND my everlasting gratitude. Like. Forever. Plus I'll draw you some art of whatever you want. Buy it [HERE.](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0784F279D)

**An Interview With The Author**

**To be clear, yes, this is me writing questions and answers with myself.**

**Why did you write this story?**

I wrote this story for several reasons. First, because I have been angry about the Romanov's fates ever since I read this book that was supposed to be Anastasia's diary, (the super lit Royal Diaries series, anyone? anyone?) and it ended with the family being set off the Siberia, and the historical notes said that they all were killed. Nine or ten year old me was very mad about this. It represented such a senseless cruelty. I had come to know these characters and I wanted them to be all right. I hope little me would like this story.

Secondly, when I was in school, (homeschooled), my mom made me read this book called Do Hard Things written by two brothers. It is a legitimate fact that every single Christian homeschooled kid in the world was made to read this book. Seriously. Find a Christian homeschooled kid. Ask them. They will have read it, I guarantee you this. Anyway, the book tells you to do hard things, but young me could not think of something like this that I could do, but then when I was considering writing this story, my brain went, "Do this! Make those brothers proud!"

Also, I was reading a book called fic: How Fanfiction Is Taking Over The World, and it was filled with stories about people writing huge works. (Not that this is a huge book but it's thousands of words more than any of the shorter fanfictions that I've ever written). While reading this book, I was on a long car ride, my brain was overheating, and I thought, "I should do something like this."

**Why make the girls come back as ghosts?**

The supernatural has always fascinated me. While I love horror stories where the ghost is a mysterious villain, I'm also interested in stories where ghosts tell their stories and exist side by side with humans, such as Laura in American Gods by Neil Gaiman. Making OTMA ghosts allowed me to continue their story after their execution, with a different break from history than, 'Anastasia survived.'

**Did you always plan on having OTMA kill Yurovsky?**

Sort of. Originally when I thought of this story I thought of it as a musical, and even outlined the plot. Since I can't write music or songs, I decided to change it to a book format. At first I wanted them to kill Lenin, since he was most probably the head person behind their deaths. However, OTMA had no direct interactions with Lenin, and I wanted the girls to have a personal connection with the man they killed. Killing someone was always the climax though.

**Why have the girls kill Yurovsky?**

My editor asked me this question when I asked her is she would be interested in proof reading my story. At first I went, "Because it's cool, duh! Women with guns!" But then I actually thought about it, and I see them killing him as a sort of reversal of roles, because their entire lives they're been pretty powerless to influence world events, and so after their death they get the chance to change history in a way they never got in their lives. I think it's a fitting revenge on Yurovsky. If he hadn't killed the family, and had instead, say, exiled them and reported back to his superiors that he had killed them, the girls would not have come back with the ability to kill him. But since he did lead the murder eleven people, he himself gets killed in the end.

**Why isn't there a lot of dialogue in this book?**

First of all, anyone who has ever had siblings knows that it's very easy to communicate with them without saying a lot. My sister and I know each other so well that she can say one word and I know exactly what she means. Since no one can hear them, there's no opportunity for the girls to talk to living people. Also, I wanted to show each of the girl's internal experiences by focusing mainly on what was going on inside their heads.

**Why didn't Alexei and their parents come back as ghosts as well?**

Like I said, I see this story very much as a reversal of power. In the royal family, obviously Nicholas the Second was very important, Alexei was the future of the nation, and Alexandra was necessary to produce a male heir. But the four girls, even though they were loved by their family and by the nation weren't really that necessary for anything. From the first time that Alexandra got pregnant everyone wanted it to be a boy. The girls were just preludes to the male heir. You'll notice that in the story they hardly ever use the first person pronouns when thinking or speaking. Instead it's we an overwhelming amount of the time. This is because the girls, and the outside world in general, viewed them as one unit, OTMA. Alexei isn't in this story because he was the super important male heir. Even though he was physically weak, he still was going to get more power than the girls ever were. But after death it's the girls that get to find the bodies, and avenge their family. The splitting up of the family also provides the main reason why the girls undertake most of their actions. Even when they were exiled in Siberia they all had each other. Their family bond was very strong and the girls will do anything to get it back.

However, as I continued writing this, I got a lot of reviewers asking me where Alexei was. While I did not want to/ could not find a place to include his chapter in the story itself, I did write a bonus chapter with him and I'll put it up next week.

**Who was your favorite girl to write?**

Okay honestly, I did not have one. After writing about 8,000 words for each of them, these girls are all my children. It was a bit hard whenever I switched between girls, because I had gotten attached to the previous one, but then I would have three chapters to get to know the new one.

**Have you read other fictional stories involving the Romanovs?**

A fictional diary of Anastasia, and I've seen both Anastasia the musical and the cartoon, but that's it. After I began writing this story I did come across several books at the library where I worked that involved them, but I didn't look at them, since I didn't want someone else's vision to influence my own.

**How much research did you do while writing this?**

The main source was The Romanov Sisters by Helen Rappaport. I also used Anastasia: The Last Grand Duchess by Carolyn Meyer, Olga's diary, and The Plot by Will Eisner, for information on Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

**How do you pronounce the title?**

I say it as 'OAT-ma' but you can pronounce all the letters individually if you wish.

Why are you asking yourself these questions? Who is interested in these answers?

Well, interviewer me, I'm really glad that I created you so I could ask myself this. I wanted to answer some questions I thought the readers might have, and I also wanted something I could work on when I was procrastinating/ got stuck in writing the actual plot of my story. If any of you have questions that I didn't answer here, ask them in the reviews and I'll answer them next week.

**Anything else you would like to say?**

First of all, [look at this picture of Yurovsky and his nasty beard. ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakov_Yurovsky#/media/File:Yakov_Mikhailovich_Yurovsky_1918.jpg)Yuck.

Second, THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH!  This was a huge project, especially for someone who had previously only written 7,000 word fics at most before. I wrote around 300 words every day, (Yes, I know was a small goal but it was a big step for me), and thinking about producing content for you guys really encouraged me. Thanks to my editor: ElizabethAnnSoph.

**What are your next projects?**

I'm going to miss this fic so much! Now, if you've looked at my other works, I write a lot of Silmarillion one shots. If you haven't read the Silmarillion, go and do it. Anyway, my next long fic is going to be "The Ultimate Children of Húrin fix it fic." I also am going to continue writing Fëanor/Nerdanel one shots, and I have an idea for an Aegnor/Andreth thing, and somethings about Numenor. As for non Silmarillion stuff, I am going to write something about Joan of Arc, so stay tuned for all of this.

**I really like your work! How can I support you? (Ok this is a hypothetical question, hypothetically someone might say this, some day, maybe.)**

Share and recommend this story to your friends/ online followers. Add this story to you favorites. If you are the kind of person who has money you can: Buy this book on Amazon. ('OTMA E. Hashimoto,) [Become a patron on Patreon](https://www.patreon.com/thedragonscosplay/posts) (Which means that you pay an amount of money per month- as low as $1- and in exchange get to see the art and cosplay content I create.) [Buy me a Ko-Fi](https://ko-fi.com/V7V85KKT) (a one time donation, kind of like a tip, saying 'Thanks for making your stuff!") 

**I have no interest in giving you money, can we be friends anyway? (This is more like something someone would say in real life)**

Yes! I am on [Tumblr](https://feanorus-rex.tumblr.com) and [Deviantart](https://thedragonscosplay.deviantart.com) (look in the folder 'OTMA' to see full versions of all the cover images I used for this fic.) Come and say hi, or just lurk.

**That's all for today! One more chapter from our boy Alexei next week!**


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The last chapter!!! I'm so sad. I loved writing this story.   
> Can I ask you guys if it was really obvious from the beginning that they were going to kill Yurovsky?

**AN: Special Alexei chapter for you all because I love you guys. Buy this fic as a eBook on Amazon[HERE](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0784F279D)**

 

Sometimes he is Alexei and sometimes he is not. At times he is completely conscious of who and what he once was- was- for although he is not sure what exactly has happened to him Alexei Nikolaevich Romanov can be sure that he is no longer a Tsarvitch. At times he is a person but unsure of his identity, as a person looking into a fogged mirror and unable to clear away the mist.  And at times he is nothing, less than a woman, less than a peasant, less than a human, his very humanity fraying as the edges, the crossed, tightly woven threads of himself pulling apart and drifting off into the universe. Unraveling. 

  Olga, his sister, he has lots of sisters, when he can remember them, once pointed up at the dark night sky and said that black was made of all colors mixed together, and he believed her at the time because he was very young, and Olga was years older than he and very wise.

  Where he is now is black, but only in the same sense that a mountain is a rock. His brain sees the expanse before him, so dark that the word scarcely applies to it and presents the word  _ black,  _ although where he is now is not the color that he remembers. This black cannot be made up of all colors, because there are no colors here, or words for colors, or light by which to see them. Even the idea of light is banished here. He remembers the word, _ light _ , and what it means, but not what it looked like, or what it felt like on his skin.

 The words he knows do not apply to the place where he is now, and this negates his ability to think logically about where he is. So he thinks about the past, when he can remember it. 

   The past contained: his royal family, his weak and frail body bleeding, the necessity for keeping his blood inside of him, since he was the Tsarvitch, the last desperate hope of his parents for an heir. He could act in ways that his sisters could not, because he was the prince, and he, as he was fond of reminding them when they argued, he outranked them. 

  He is dead. Alexei knows that, or knows that at least he has ceased to live in the world. He has sharp memories of bullets, not the ones that killed him, and then two sharp shots in the head, which did. In the beginning he hoped that he was not dead for if he still lived there was some hope that he could die and go somewhere else. Here was very boring, and he could not escape it as he could a dull lesson. 

  He wonders where his family is. Blind and paralyzed as he was, just a hair’s breath from him? In Heaven? In Hell? 

  If this is the curious condition that he, the Tsarvitch, finds himself after death, than what must ordinary people experience? What place would Yakov Yurovsky have after  _ his _ death? Yurovsky is someone he remembers. 

_   It is Monday, _ he says to himself. Today he remembers that he is Alexei- not Nikolaevich, not Romanov, not the Tsarvitch. He is not sure if his father, the giver of his patronymic even exists anymore. The Romanovs are not real anymore. He is sure of that. The Tsar, the dear leader of Russia, a royal, next to God, the link between the divine and the people, was shot unfeelingly in Siberia, and with him and his family died the end of everything they have ever known. Alexei’s education was rather lacking due to his various health problems, and of course the time spent in exile, but he can see this with clarity. 

  Of course, it is not Monday, or perhaps it could be, he has no way of knowing how much time has elapsed between his death and now. But Monday is what he has decided to deem those times when he remembers who he is. It can be Monday for what feels like years, or only a brief moment. 

  He likes Mondays. He likes being Alexei Romanov, although when he is not he does not miss it. It is nice to have something to remember. He has years and years of memories to think on. Happy ones. He had a good life.  Most of them involve his four sisters, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia. They called themselves OTMA and when he came along they added another letter, OTMAA, yet he was never so much a connected part of their life, and they remained OTMA. These four girls were always with him, instructing, scolding, teaching, and teasing. There has never been a part of his life where he has not known them. Even in the end, in Siberia, the thought that their family would be permanently split up was unthinkable. Even after they were told that the revolution was dying, Alexei was certain that they would all go into death together. He is without his sisters now, and it is strange. He is only A, with no other supporting letters. 

  Sometimes, when he remembers that he is Alexei for too long, his mind seems to burn inside his skull, rattling around in his body,  _ let me out, let me out. _ He is trapped here and he cannot break free, possibly until the end of time.  _ Why am I here?  _ This cannot be Hell. Hell was never described like this, not by priests, not in any of the literature he struggled through reading in school. When someone was in Hell, they knew, and they knew what for. But he, Alexei, did not know why he is here, if this was Hell, and surely the point of Hell is for sinners to know where in life they went wrong? Olga and Tatiana accused him of being spoiled. And he got up to some great mischiefs with Anastasia. Perhaps he is here for those. But Anastasia herself did many things also, such as throwing a rock packed in snow at Tatiana. Where is she? They could find a way to get out together. And if this is not Hell, certainly this is not Heaven, where is this place? How can he get out? He does not like Mondays. 

  And then he will forget, in the manner of one waking, then sleeping, then waking again with no memory of the transition, and Alexei will be no one again.

_ Purgatory _ , he thinks maybe. If so than he can do nothing until he is released, and it angers him. But if he was in Purgatory then surely he will be released soon. The entire nation will be praying for him. Or at least they would have. Russia may be different now. 

_ Let me out! _ In the past he was the Tsarvitch, and no one in all of Russia had the power to constrain him. Even his servants, attempting to restrain him from playing too wildly, could never command him with any force, because he was the prince. His blood was royal, and too thin. He could damage himself and that could not be had. But he did. Alexei was a young boy and hated being forced to sit down quietly. He would play with his sisters- Anastasia was always game for anything- and often injure himself, but despite the pain he felt after falling; when an ordinary bruise would swell and give him pain for hours afterwards, he would not be passive and hold still. He would throw himself down stairs, jump around any room, or down a pile of snow. In Siberia he had more trouble walking and was doubly imprisoned in a wheelchair and in Ipatiev House.

   When he was shot, he could not ever run. Others ran. Maria tried to dash towards the door. Alexei could do nothing. At least he was killed quickly. He does not remember the pain. 

It is dark. He is Alexei and he waits. 


End file.
